Your heading structure helps both Google and your website users read your content and understand what’s important. Readers can navigate your content more easily when you break up paragraphs with headlines and subheads, but for Google to correctly understand your content, it’s important to use the correct structure for your headlines, lists and block quotes. Here’s how to format your content correctly:

Headlines

Your headline styles will be built into your page, and you can select Headline 1 (H1), Headline 2 (H2), Headline 3 (H3), etc. Depending on which headline style you choose, the size, font and weight of the headline will look different on your page.

Don’t choose a headline style because of the way it looks, though — you always want to choose descending headline styles. For example, if the first headline on the page is an H2, you’ll want the subheads under that category to be in the order of H3, H4, H5, etc. — don’t go out of sequence.

• Correct: H2, H3, H4, H5
• Incorrect: H2, H5, H3

You’ll want to choose an H2 for your first headline style on a post, not an H1. This is because you’ll already have an H1 coded into your site as the static header (page title) for the entire page, so you’ll need to choose the next headline style in line — H2 — to maintain descending headlines.

Here’s a definition of headline styles:

• H1: Reserved for the page title; there should only be one instance of H1 on the page, and that should not be within the website’s content area.
• H2: Subheadings within the content page to break up areas of content.
• H3: Sub-subheadings are used to break content into areas within a major content block.
• H4-H6: These have a lower semantic value and can be used for more presentational text formatting from time to time, or if heaven forbid you have a sub-sub-subheading.

Lists and Block Quotes

To format a list, highlight your entire list and choose either the Bulleted List or Numbered List option. Bulleted Lists are used for non-ordered lists, and Numbered Lists are usually used for ordered lists. To create a block quote, add a line break before and after the quote, then highlight the entire quote and select Blockquote.

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