HTML Heading (title) Tags

In another article on this site titled, "What Are ALT Tags And How Do You Use Them?" I referred to a forum posting that told people to "USE CAPITAL LETTERS IN THE ALT TAG SO THE SPIDERS READ IT AS A TITLE. IT GIVES IT MORE WEIGHT!" This same person told people to use the sam all capital letters in titles and to make their titles bold so they were given more weight by search engines. Neither of these points is true. Titles, actually "headings", using the <hx> tags do get more weight but it is the fact that they are enclosed in heading tags that does this and not whether or not they are all in caps or in bold.

In most browsers, heading text is rendered in bold by default and unless indicated otherwise. This is proper coding for a title:

<h2 style='font-weight: normal'>This Is A Title That Won't Be Bold Text!</h2>

There are a lot of myths circulating on the 'net about HTML and other coding and especially in regards search engine optimization (SEO). To get the best results for your web pages and listings you need to know the truth.

The proper way to denote titles, or headings, in an HTML document is to use the heading tag set. There are six distinct tag pairs in this group:

<h1> .. </h1>
<h2> .. </h2>
<h3> .. </h3>
<h4> .. </h4>
<h5> .. </h5>
<h6> .. </h6>

Each tag pair denotes the level of importance, or rank, of the title based on the number the tag contains with 1 indicating the most important and 6 indicating the least important. For example, a document's main title might have the highest ranking, chapter titles might have the second ranking, section titles within chapters might have third ranking and, finally, sub-titles within sections might have fourth ranking. It is not a requirment to use all levels of titles in any given document.