If you're a do-it-yourselfer (DIYer) when it comes to building your website, there are a number of strategies you can use to help yourself in getting your webpages ranked in the seach engines. for example, carefully written titles, description meta tags, keyword-rich body text and incoming links.

An important, but often neglected, element is the use of keywords in your Headings. The single most important heading on a page is the headline, name of the article or page name. Call it what you want, just be aware that this isn't the same as the Title Tag which shows up on search engines.

Headings are the large font headlines that tell what's on a webpage -- the main headline as well as subheadings. There's an art to writing a headline, but that's a blog for another day. What we're concerned with here is the structure of your heading/headline.

Headings in HTML,  H1, H2, H3... offer important clues to the search engines . Since headlines often contain important clues to the content of the webpage, search engines take note of any keywords found in headings. 

In HTML, there are six header tags:

• H1
• H2
• H3
• H4
• H5
• H6

 <H# ...> indicates a header or a title of a section or subsection of the document. For example, to start the section of your page that discusses your product, you might put--

<H1>Buy My Product<H1/>

Which gives you this on the page

Buy My Product

 Each header tag indicates the relative importance of each section it is heading: <H1 ...> is for the major sections of your document, or as the one header to the entire document. <H2 ...> is for the secondary sections of your document, etc.

Using keyword-rich heading and subheads not only helps your search engine rankings, it can also make it easier for visitors to read the content on the page. Since many people start out skimming a webpage when they land on it, headers and subheads can both help gain their attention and guide them to what they are searching for.

So use keyword-rich headers and subheads frequently on your page. The search engines will take notice and so will visitors to your page.