Overview
Headings in HTML come in the form of <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, and <h6> tags. They are used to break up the text on your page into grouping for easier reading and better SEO.
A page should always contain an <h1> if possible. Usually this will come in the form of what you used for the <title> of the page in the <head> of your document. See HTML – Basic Page Template for a brief explanation of the <title> tag.
<h1>Heading 1</h1>
<h2>Heading 2</h2>
<h3>Heading 3</h3>
<h4>Heading 4</h4>
<h5>Heading 5</h5>
<h6>Heading 6</h6>Then, if you have enough text on the page to warrant having subheadings, they would come as <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, and <h6> tags. While your page should only contain one <h1> heading, these subheadings can each be used as many times as necessary on the page. However, it is rare to need to use the full range of tags. You’ll find yourself using <h2> and <h3> the most frequently, and that will often suffice in breaking up your text.
Using Heading Tags as Page Structure
Think of the page structure as an outline of what you’re trying to say. The <h1> heading may be the article name and you may have 3 subparts of equal value that are split up under their respective <h2> headings, and each <h2> may contain any number of <h3> headings, and so on.
<h1>Heading 1</h1>
<h2>Heading 2</h2>
<p>Text goes here.</p>
<h3>Heading 3</h3>
<p>Text goes here.</p>
<h2>Heading 2</h2>
<p>Text goes here.</p>
<h3>Heading 3</h3>
<p>Text goes here.</p>
<h3>Heading 3</h3>
<p>Text goes here.</p>
<h2>Heading 2</h2>
<p>Text goes here.</p>
<h3>Heading 3</h3>
<p>Text goes here.</p>
<h4>Heading 4</h4>
<p>Text goes here.</p>By default browsers will display the headings in a text size going from largest <h1> to smallest <h6>. However, you can change the sizing by using CSS to style the various headings to your liking.
Note
Headings are meant to break up the page into smaller bites. Don’t use a heading simply to make a line of text bigger or bolder. There are better ways to do that.
HTML Notes:
- In our HTML section the term “tag” and “element” are often used interchangeably to refer to both the tag used to create a page element and the element created by the tag (<p> tag = <p> element = paragraph on the page)
- HTML5 is not case sensitive; so <P> is the same as <p>, <H1> is the same as <h1>
- Global attributes can be used with all HTML tags and are therefore not mentioned on every tag page
- To write clean, readable HTML code, it is best to use indentation whereas elements within elements are indented (tabbed or spaces) to create something that looks like a project outline
- The browser will automatically remove any extra spaces and lines in your HTML code when the page is displayed
- Double quotes or single quotes can be used around HTML attribute values, but when the attribute value itself contains one form of quote, it will be necessary to use the other around the attribute
We’d like to acknowledge that we learned a great deal of our coding from W3Schools and TutorialsPoint, borrowing heavily from their teaching process and excellent code examples. We highly recommend both sites to deepen your experience, and further your coding journey. We’re just hitting the basics here at 1SMARTchicken.