Digital Machiavelli #7: The Magical World of Headings
Laying the foundation for the best content navigation experience.
Welcome back to my ongoing digital content strategy course, delivered straight to your inbox every week.
What You’ll Learn Today: The basic principles of headings in written content, and how you should use them to create the best experience for your readers.
As I alluded to in my very first post last year, I want to focus more sharply on specific information architecture elements, why they’re important, and how to think about using them to create the best content experience possible.
So much like an article starts off with a heading, I’ll start off this series of posts with the topic of headings.
Size, Weight & Placement
Headings vary primarily by font size and weight, and it’s this variation that defines the content hierarchy in any given piece of written content, from blog posts to news articles and from scientific papers to technical product documentation.
The easiest way to understand the most basic benefit of headings is to scroll down a page too quickly to actually read anything.
You may not be able to grasp any of the text, but you still perceive the overarching structure of the content on the highest level.
In other words, headings act as visual hurdles that interrupt the flow of the page and help you zero in on the different sections of the content in front of you.
But aside from the visual effect, headings also carry information, and it’s that combination of visual contrast and top-level information that makes them so useful for breaking up a larger piece of content into digestible sections and subsections.
This may seem obvious, but it really helps to review anything you’ve written to ensure you’ve broken your writing into enough parts to make it intuitive and easy for navigation, because nowadays we simply don’t have the time for anything less.
Don’t assume everyone will read your entire piece of content from start to finish in linear fashion. In fact, in the Attention Economy of the 2020s, it’s best to assume the opposite.
Headings vs Search Engines
Search engines use headings to figure out the major subsections of content on any given page, which helps them display the most relevant previews for the results you get for your search query.
This is where the web-specific elements of headings come in.
If you’ve used a content management system of any kind to manage a website, you’ve likely used a WYSIWYG editor that allows you to work in a way similar to word processing software like Microsoft Word.
But unlike Word, a CMS editor allows you to create web pages rather than document files, so all formatting you apply is inherently mapped to HTML and CSS code.
In the case of headers, these are H tags, so a header you format visually in your browser-based editor is automatically translated into HTML code.
<h1>This is the highest tier heading.</h1>
<h6>This is the lowest tier heading.</h6>
While the details of this have been lost to the mists of time, at some point in the not too distant past web content writers were absolutely certain that you should only ever have one H1 heading on a page to indicate the main title of the content.
Fortunately, we’ve since had a fair amount of direct information to contradict this.
Google has been the most outspoken about it, as they generally are, because of their overarching focus on making web content creation as natural as possible, rather than full of hurdles built around the technical aspects of search engine optimization.
In short, don’t get too caught up in the mechanics. Use headings to give your readers a comfortable experience, which will lead to the best outcomes in the long run.
Headings vs Word Processors
Of course, not everyone writes content directly for publication on their own website. Plenty of people still use Word and other word processing software to compile everything from corporate documents to movie scripts and more.
Unlike most CMS editors, Word (and the Google Docs equivalent) offers a feature called Styles that allows you to apply predefined styles to any text you select.
This feature allows you to avoid the hassle of formatting headings manually across your entire document, not just because you can apply a style to any text with a single click, but in reverse too, since you can edit any style and have the changes applied to all headings of a particular tier.
To start, you’ll need to set the heading styles to match the size and weight of the headings you create from scratch, which you can do by updating them via right-click.
Once you’ve setup the formatting you want for all the different headings and other text in your document, you’re set to work with the content without the hassle of manually formatting everything.
Word will also handily use the text that has Heading styles applied to it as section titles for generating a table of contents, be it within the Word document itself or in a PDF you export for external consumption.
All told, headings are a critically important part of information architecture, but don’t let their straightforward nature lull you into complacency.
Each article or document needs its own hierarchy that best suits the narrative constructed within it, and headings are the first and most important line of defense when it comes to retaining your readers’ attention.