Most of us, I think, do know how to count. Here is a basic example starting from the number one: One, two, three, four, five. Pretty easy right? Now lets try frontwards and backwards: One, two, three, two, one. It’s easy, a total snap, or at least you would think so. Now lets try it the way webmaster are often caught counting with header tags: <h1>, <h3>, <h1>, <h4>. That is not how you count, and what the heck is going on?!

SEO Gone Wild

As far I can tell it’s SEO madness gone wild. In an effort to improve their SEO, webmasters are often building their sites for visitors and search engines. They use header tags for the search engines because they know they like them, and then they identify content for the visitors using headers because they can help make the site easier to scan. Mix in: a year or so of editing, a site with poor organization, possible multiple editors, a SEO expert, and the next thing you know you have a webmaster/website that can’t count. Header tags should be in order.

What to Do, and How

When you use heading tags try to keep count. The first header should be H1, followed by H2. You can go back to H1, but you can not go forward to H4. You can’t because you haven’t used H3 yet: One, two, three, four. Remember? How crazy is your site now. Well there is an easy way to check, and if you did it right you will have a easy to read outline. You should also be a little proud of yourself. There are not too many of you.

So here is how you check. Visit http://validator.w3.org/, and type in your website url. Before you hit “Check” though, hit the “More Options” link underneath the text box. Upon opening that, mark the box titled, “Show Outline”. Now you can hit the “Check” button to validate your site. Depending on if you passed validation or not you may need to scroll down to see your outline, but in the end the results should be there. Do you know how to count?