Formatting and editing are important parts of building a blog that performs well, both for SEO and for individual users. Here we’ll cover some of the basics.
The importance of headings
Headings matter for two reasons; the first is that they make your blog more readable for visitors. It’s a lot easier to read something that is broken up by sensical headings than it is to read a wall of text with no formatting. Also, a lot of website visitors skim content, rather than read it closely, and headings aid people in being able to quickly skim your post and glean your main ideas and important points.
The use of headings is also important for SEO: Google looks at the content marked as headings (H1–H6) and draws conclusions about the content, value, and applicability of the post for a given query. Without headings, Google isn’t likely to view your post as important or helpful. Headings are more than just style choices; heading tags appear in the code that Google looks at when crawling your site, and the different heading tags tell Google about the content on your blog and its importance.
Using headings in a blog template
Your blog is built using templates that allow you to enter text that will be formatted to match the look of your other posts, as well as the rest of your site. As part of this, the design choices for how headings appear have be preset. All you need to do is format the text appropriately, and the template will take care of the rest.
Step one
Type a “/” to open the block selection menu.
Step two
Select Heading to format the block as a heading.
Step three
You can use the formatting bar to change to a different header style.
🚨 You don’t need to apply any formatting besides the appropriate heading level. Making heading text bold is not necessary, and if the styles are already set to make that level heading bolded, it will actually un-bold the text. Let the template handle the formatting; you only need to tell it what text is a heading.
🌱 You can also set a header format by typing the shortcut and pressing enter. For an H2, you would type /H2 and then press enter. Then type your heading as usual!
There can only be one H1
The H1 tag is the most important tag, indicating the high-level topic of a given page; a page should only ever have one H1, including blogs. For blog posts, the title is always the H1. Your blog post template is set up to properly tag your title automatically, so you can just enter your title into the appropriate space at the top of the editor, and the template will do the rest.
However, this means that in the body of your post, there shouldn’t be any more H1s. The highest-level header you should use in the body of a post is H2. (There can be multiple H2s.)
Because the H1 is weighted most heavily for SEO, you should aim to have at least one keyword in your blog titles. You can always have multiple keywords in your title, as long as they are all used naturally. Do not stuff your H1 (or any headings) with keywords.
Outline logic
Headings should function like an outline for your post: if you took all the body copy out and only included the headings, people should still be able to follow the overall flow of the post. Someone should be able to scan your headings and determine if your post is addressing something they are interested in or not.
As mentioned before, it’s okay to have multiples of all the headings other than H1. A blog post that is 1200 words might have anywhere between 2 to 7 H2s to properly organize the topics being covered.
A smaller heading tag should fall under the heading tag above it:
An H3 should come after an H2.
An H4 should come after an H3.
And so on.
Don’t base your heading choice on the style; choose headings by the organization and overall flow of the logic of a post. You should never have an H3 without an H2 because the heading tag is part of the code that communicates the hierarchy of information found on a webpage. A standalone H3 doesn’t make much sense on its own because it is subordinate to something that doesn’t exist.
While the overall formatting should follow an outline logic, it doesn’t have to be as strict as outlines in academic contexts. For example, it’s okay to have a single H3 under an H2 if you feel like the H3 heading would be helpful for the flow of the section. Use headings to help readers organize the content in their minds.
Other formatting considerations
Apart from headings, there are other ways that you can format your blog post to help it perform better overall.
Be consistent and professional with capitalization
Blogs are often written by more than one person, but they should still be standardized in their formatting. This allows readers to jump between posts and not have to constantly adjust to a new format, and it creates an overall professional appearance of a well-oiled content machine.
Title capitalization
Titles are capitalized differently than sentences, but there are numerous styles for title capitalization. To keep things polished, you should choose one of these styles and stick to it.
Title capitalization can be tricky and fraught with obscure rules, so don’t wing it; use a tool like Capitalize My Title to ensure everything is correct. This tool allows you to enter text that will automatically be capitalized to follow your desired style guide. If you aren’t familiar with styles, I’d recommend APA, Chicago, AP, or MLA.
It’s a good idea to use title capitalization for your blog titles, but you can also use it for headings, depending on your preferences. At Valerian, we only use title capitalization for blog titles, but using it for all headings (or even just H2s) is a valid choice. Just be sure to make a choice and do it consistently.
DON’T USE ALL CAPS
See what I did there? 🤭
If you felt like that heading was suddenly and needlessly aggressive or bossy, that’s the reason why all caps isn’t recommended. Avoid using all caps since it can be a real turn-off for readers and introduce unnecessary complexities into the formatting.
Note: Some heading formats or templates may display things in all caps, but that’s always a calculated design choice.
Be careful with lists
It’s very popular to title a post something like Top 10 Tricks for XYZ or 5 Lessons I Learned about XYZ. This format can be really effective, but don’t fall for the trap of using the list formatting option in WordPress to organize the whole post.
If you use the list format, you’ll lose the ability to format any headings. The post will seem organized, but when it’s published, it’ll look much more like a wall of text than it will a good blog post.
If a list is part of the high-level organization of a piece, you can always include the numbers in the headings; just select the proper heading and then type the number in. For example:
H1: Top 10 Tools for Your Workday
H2: 1. Slack
This way, you’ll get the best of both worlds.
If a list is appearing in the midst of your post, it’s fine to use the list format. Just try to keep content within a list brief; otherwise, a person gets a little lost wondering if they’re still in the list or not. Lists are not the place for paragraphs of text.
Use a grammar checker (not just a spellchecker)
A lot of folks use blogs to engage in thought leadership and position themselves as experts in their field. However, thought leadership falls flat when there are easy-to-catch typos and mistakes.
Many word processors and tools include automatic spellcheckers that will underline your typos in red. However, there is a difference between spelling mistakes and grammar mistakes, and most spellcheckers won’t catch grammar issues. (Grammar mistakes are things like subject-verb agreement, punctuation usage, etc.)
Grammarly is a great tool for catching all those small errors that might slip through the cracks of your drafting and review process. There are also plugins for web browsers that allow live grammar checking to happen in Google Docs, email, and more. Grammarly isn’t 100% correct, but it’s a good place to start, and it’ll catch a lot of the small errors that people commonly make. Having a human editor with excellent grammar knowledge is always best, but Grammarly can take you pretty far.
CTAs
One of the most important aspects of your blog posts are the CTAs: you want people to do something after reading your post, so make sure it’s clear and easy for them to do it!
Make it logical
CTAs work best when they’re related to the post in some way. When we write a post about websites, it makes sense that our CTA calls people to check out our website offerings. Your blog post topics should have a strategy that connects to the actions you want website visitors to take, so hopefully the CTAs come naturally. Look at the main goals of your website overall and use blog CTAs to drive traffic to those same actions.
Be direct and clear
No one should ever have to hunt for your CTA. The next step for someone should always be obvious and easy to take. You also want to keep it brief so people don’t get lost in the CTA itself, trying to figure out what to do:
✅ Check out our services today!
❌ Have you been thinking about trying our services? Now is a great time. You can find more information on our site by clicking on the button below. You’ll be glad you did.
Although it might not seem like it, reading and understanding things can burn a lot of energy. CTAs are all about energy conservation: you want to make it as easy as possible for someone to do the desired action. Remove as many steps and obstacles between your website visitors and the action you want them to take as possible.
Depending on the format of the CTAs in your blog, you may need a little more content. Some templates include a CTA block that stands out from the rest of the post, and some folks have their CTAs nested right inside the text of the post. Either way, the main CTA should be brief, incredibly clear, and easily actionable.