High School English Revisited: The Outline

by cindy on May 12, 2009

Remember when you had to write a report in English class, and you had to turn in your notes and outline? It probably looked something like this:

Jane Austen: A History

I.  Childhood
    1.  Born December 16, 1775
    2.  Seven siblings
    3.  Father Rev. George Austen
    4.  Mother Cassandra
II. Major Works
    1.  Sense and Sensibility
        A.  First novel
        B.  Bestseller
        C.  And on and on...

You may have thought it was the most boring and pointless exercise ever concocted. Next to calculating the angles of an isosceles triangle, anyway. But it turns out that your English teacher was giving you a good preview of formatting a blog posting. Nevermind that blogs (and the Internet, if you’re as old as me) hadn’t been invented yet.

<h2> Is for the Title

The title of your blog post is automatically formatted with <h2> tags in most themes. If your theme doesn’t do this, find a new one. So in our Jane Austen example, “Jane Austen: A History,” is the post title. Pretty simple, right?

<h3> Is for the Subdivisions

You can’t just throw a pile of words on the screen and expect it to make sense. You have to have some sort of order, some kind of logical flow. That’s why your teacher made you break up Jane’s life into segments. Each segment, or subdivision, gets an <h3> tag.

If you want further subdivisions, say for each of Jane’s major works, you can drag out the <h4> tags as well. In fact, you can use <h5> and <h6> if you like, but most blog posts won’t require that level of organization.

But What is the Point of Heading Tags?

Aside from making your post more readable and keeping English teachers everwhere happy, the point of using all those tags is Google. Google likes them. Google looks for them. And when Google finds them, Google says, “Hey, this must be important stuff here between these tags.” Okay, it’s not just Google, it’s all the search engines, but it’s really Google we care about isn’t it?

Besides Google, though, your readers use headings in your blog post, too. Readers are busy people. You don’t really think they’re reading every word your write, do you? No way. They’re scanning. Headings make it easier for them to find the sections they really want to read, and to skip the sections they don’t care about, or already know.

In order to keep both Google and your reader happy, then, you should try to put relevant keywords in those tags. If you want your blog post to be found in Google for the keyword “Sense and Sensibility,” then you want to make sure that appears as a heading, in addition to being in the text of the post itself.

What Happened to <h1>?

As you may have guessed, heading tags are hierarchical, meaning <h1> is more important than <h2>, which is more important than <h3>, and so on. So where is the <h1> tag? That tag is reserved for the title of your blog. If you’re thinking maybe you should have a keyword or two in the title of your blog, you would be right. Just keep in mind that the size of the Internet and the resulting lack of keyword rich dot coms might make that nearly impossible.

Okay, I’m Convinced. Now What Do I Do?

Using heading tags is simple. If you’re writing in plain text mode where you can see all the <p>s and <img>s and <a href=>s, just type <h3> before your section header text, and </h3> after it. If you’re writing in the visual editor in WordPress, highlight your text, and in the drop down list just below the buttons for bold and italics, choose the heading style you like.

If you want to change how the heading styles look, you’ll need to dig into your CSS file. We’ll cover that in a future post. For now, just get used to using the heading tags, and get used to using them wisely. You’ll keep both your readers and Google happy, and your site will get more visitors as a result.