by Wizzer
How To Use H1 & H2 Tags On WordPress Posts
Jul 11 2011 in All by Wizzer
It is important to use the H1 & H2 tags…
…for Search Engine Optimisation purposes.
Depending on the WordPress theme you are using your headings will look different as with many themes you can customise the size, font and colour of the text in your headings.
Many themes now allow you to make these changes in an “options” area but if that is not a feature of your theme you can still make the changes but will need to edit the Style.css file.
I should first clarify that H1 tags are NOT like tags used when creating your posts. Those tags are used to help your visitors find relevant content – a kind of labelling exercise. H1, H2, H3 etc, are used to change the look of the headings used on your posts and are taken into consideration by the search engines in their calculation of the relevance of your content,
H1 is the largest heading through to H6 being the smallest.
To use the H1 & H2 (or indeedany of the heading tags) you simply have to highlight the text you wish to use as a heading and click the “Paragraph” pull down box when in the WordPress Visual Editor:
This is Heading One
And some standard “paragraph” text to follow
This is Heading Two
This is Heading Three
A really easy way to check whether you are using H tags on your posts is to install the Firebug Add-On to the Firefox browser.
All you need to do is to highlight the relevant text, right click the mouse and choose “Inspect Element”. A box at the bottom half of the screen will open and you can instantly see if the text has the relevant tags associated with it:
You can get the free Firebug add-on here. It is far more useful than for just checking H tags but a discussion regarding its use for other purposes is beyond the scope of this posts.
Diana Strittmatter said on July 12, 2011
Hi Mark,
Thanks for the info on H1 and H2 tags. The problem I am having is that these tags are not showing up at all in the theme I am using which is the Mandigo.
What I want to do is add these tags to the theme html code reflecting H1 as my blog title and H2 as my post name which from what I’ve read, is the preferred way to have these tags set-up.
How do I go about changing the html code to add these tags? This is all new for me and you know that I don’t get along with html.
Thanks much,
Diana
Wizzer said on July 12, 2011
Hi Diana
With Mandigo there’s no need to get into the code – you can change the H tags inside the theme options.
This short video shows you how:
http://screencast.com/t/TNRDd1eZxsY
After you’ve made the changes don’t forget to scroll to the top or bottom of the page and click the Update Options button to save the changes.
Mark
Diana Strittmatter said on July 13, 2011
Thanks Mark! I do have those settings since the beginning but noticed that the post title tag was not set up as 2.
I made the change and will run another test to see if this helps.
Thanks again,
Diana
Wizzer said on July 13, 2011
Keep us updated with progress Diana – I checked and your Post Titles are now showing up as H2
Mark
Diana Strittmatter said on July 14, 2011
Hi Mark,
Not sure what happened here but I changed the tags as mentioned, and then upgraded to the latest version of WP and now I can’t get to my theme options.
When I click to go there, I get the following message:
You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.
I can access the theme editor info with no problem but not the theme options.
Not sure if changing the tags caused this problem or upgrading to the latest version of WP.
Any ideas how I can fix this?
Thanks much,
Diana
Wizzer said on July 14, 2011
Hi Diana
I just tried to replicate the issue on WizzerSays and got the same problem.
The issue on my install is that I still have an older version of Mandigo and that seems not to be compatible with WordPress 3.2
I downloaded and installed Madigo 1.42 – you can get it here: http://www.onehertz.com/portfolio/wordpress/mandigo/download/
and the problem is resolved. Incidentally I couldn’t install via the Admin area and had to FTP the theme.
Hope it works for you. Let me know.
Mark