Headings are the outline of your page

The outline nobody sees

Under every well built page there is a nested list: the title, the sections, the parts within each section. Sighted readers absorb it from type size and spacing without thinking about it.

Assistive technology reads that list directly. A reader can pull up every heading on the page and jump straight to the one that sounds right, skipping everything else. If your outline is wrong, that shortcut sends them somewhere strange.

You can see your own outline in about ten seconds. Most browsers have an extension that lists the headings on a page, and reading that list is the fastest way to find out whether your structure says what you think it says.

One main heading, then order

Give a page one top level heading that says what the page is. Then run sections beneath it, in order, without skipping levels on the way down.

Skipping a level is the common slip. A section heading followed by something two steps smaller implies a missing layer, and the outline reads as though a chunk of the page fell out.

Size is not structure

The mistake that causes most of this is treating heading tags as font sizes. A line gets promoted because it should look bigger, or demoted because it looked too loud.

Decide the level from the meaning, then style it to whatever size suits the design. A minor heading can be set large. A major one can be set small. The outline underneath stays honest either way.

Writing headings worth skimming

A heading should survive being read on its own, out of order, with nothing around it. That is exactly how it will be encountered.

So prefer what a roof inspection covers over the vague single word overview. Say what the section contains. A page whose headings read like a table of contents is easier for every reader and easier for a search engine to place.

Questions work particularly well, because they match the way people actually search. A heading reading what a roof inspection covers will meet the person who typed almost exactly that, which is the subject of heading tags and search.

Long pages need more levels, not bigger type

A guide of several thousand words genuinely needs subsections, and that is what the lower heading levels are for. The temptation is to keep everything at one level and separate it with spacing instead.

Spacing is invisible to speech. A reader pulling up the heading list gets twenty entries at the same level and no sense of which belong together.

Group them properly. Three subsections under a section is a structure somebody can navigate. Twenty flat headings is a list they have to read from the top.

The signal that you need another level is usually repetition. If three of your section headings begin with the same two words, those three are one section with three parts.

What headings are not

Do not use a heading to make a line of body copy stand out. Use bold. Do not wrap an entire paragraph in a heading tag, which some editors do when text is enlarged by hand.

And do not hide keyword stuffed headings off screen. It corrupts the outline for the readers who rely on it, and it is the sort of thing that gets a page treated as spam rather than as content.

• A way to make one line of body copy stand out — use bold
• A container for a whole paragraph that needed emphasis
• A place to hide keywords off screen
• A styling choice made because the text looked too small
• A label on a logo or a tagline in the site header
• A substitute for writing a section that actually says something

How the builder handles it

Pages here carry one main heading with section headings in order, because the structure comes from the plan rather than from styling choices made later. Every page passes a check that runs before anything publishes, validated against Google Search Essentials and modern web standards.

A machine can catch a skipped level or a second main heading. It cannot tell you whether your heading describes the section honestly. Read your own outline top to bottom and see whether it tells the story.

Reading your own outline back

Copy every heading on a page into a plain list, in order, with nothing else. Then read it as though it were the only thing you had.

If it tells the story of the page, the structure is right. If it reads as a set of disconnected labels, the headings are describing your layout rather than your content.

This is also roughly what an answer engine sees when it decides what a page covers. Nothing here is legal advice, but a page whose outline is honest is easier for every reader and every machine to place.

Do it before publishing rather than after. An outline is cheap to change while a page is a draft and awkward to change once the page has links pointing at its anchors.