An SEO Saving WordPress Blogging Tip That Helps You Avoid Wrong Use Of Headline Tags

When I first started with WordPress, I used a content builder. I used Divi and more recently, Thrive Themes. Divi was always my go-to. This made building and structuring out epic blog posts easy. And because I learned everything while using Divi, I was taken down a few notches when learning how WordPress really works.

The WRONG way to style blog posts.

When I got off WordPress pagebuilders, I started using headline tags excessively when structuring out my blog posts. For my longer 5,000 plus word blog posts, this became an SEO disaster if you saw what I was doing.

Luckily, soon after I had the inclination to research if what I was doing was wrong.

My background is in email marketing and copywriting, I never really gave SEO the time of day.

Today, I think SEO is all I should give my time of day to, and I’m having a great time learning all about it. It’s a rabbit hole I’m happy to have dropped into.

I am producing all my own content. This means I must have a well-rounded skillset to be able to produce high-quality content, both written and in its on-page optimizations. Trial by error continues. No shame…

Not thinking about SEO or blog post structure, I’d simply use Headline Tags to style my blog posts.

^^That sentence above does NOT use a headline tag.^^

And that’s what this blog post is going to show you how to do.

This blog post shows you the WordPress newbie tip that for some of you, will be far too beginner-level to be worthy of going into.

But for my fellow non-coder blogging brethren, you might enjoy learning how to create headline looking sentences without the use of headline tags as much as I did when I first figured this out.

It’s my little contribution to the online pool of WordPress blogging tips.

Why it’s bad to use too many headline tags in your blog posts

^^That one’s a headline (H2).

So when I first got off of Elegant Themes’ Divi, I randomly plugged H1’s, H2’s and H3’s to H6 sentences EVERYWHERE.

I’d bold and italicize as well, but the headline tag usage was belligerent.

Random headlines all over the place are worse for SEO than big walls of solid, boring text.

I’ve been following Semantic Mastery blog a lot this year, and on one of their last webinars, they explained how through their SEO tests, they can see how headline tags do matter.

What I was doing had an effect on how my blog post ranked on Google.

Outside of the facts, the simple concept of using headline tags wrong was something I didn’t comprehend when I started my niche blogs.

Using tons of random headline tags in your blogging is a bad idea: Learning this fact was what led me to the proper WordPress blog post styling solution when it comes to bolding and creating headline-looking sentences in the WordPress Editor.

What I’m onto now: Currently, I’m in the process of coming up with a consistent blog template. I am also dipping into CSS shortcode modifications to style my WordPress blog posts. Without my trusted Divi pagebuilder, shortcodes are THE way to customize WordPress blog posts.

How I Found I Was Blogging Wrong

Right after I installed this Easy Table Of Contents plugin, I was able to see how messy my headlines actually were.

My first blog posts were long pillar posts, so installing a TOC plugin instantly showed me what I was doing wrong. It allowed me to see it clearly.

This was one of my several big blogging “Aha” moments.

It’s good that any SEO damage from doing that is reversible. You simply just fix it. So that’s what I did.

Bottom Line: H1, H2, and H3 through H6 tags matter.

The quest for a better way…

So, I went on a search to figure out how to enlarge a piece of text WITHOUT a plugin (Advanced TinyMCE Editor) and without having to dip into my stylesheet.

This is what I found.

I’m sure there are many other good blog posts on the subject as well, but I stopped at this one because it works perfectly.

Example:

Before I had a big quote in block letters centered above an image. It was a bold statement and it looked great. I had it in Divi.

When I moved over to Genesis, without the pagebuilder my first inclination was to just use the H1 and other headline tags.

But now, when I want big bolded text, I use little snippets like this: TEXT HERE

This is what the xx-large font size text looks like (I centered and bolded it afterward).

Making an H1 tag headline text in five different spots within one of my 3,000-word blog posts was my prior method.

Now I use these little snippets of code instead. They go from XX-large to XX-small and beyond.

Let me list them all out real quick: