Subheadings (H2 to H6)
The heading hierarchy that divides a page into sections, giving it a structure a reader and a machine can both follow.
Analogy Mental model
The table of contents of a book. H2 is the chapter, H3 the section, H4 the subsection, and nothing starts above H2.
In practice What you actually do
Use H2 for the questions the page answers, phrased the way a searcher asks them, and H3 for the parts underneath. Long-tail phrasing and the questions from the results page belong here, which is why the outline is worth writing before the prose.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Skipping levels breaks the outline for screen readers as well as crawlers. Using headings to make text bigger is the other error: that is what CSS is for, and a heading that is not really a heading pollutes the document structure.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →