Header Tags allow web designers to title sections of a page using headings, subheadings, etc. In web development we have tags for this ranking from H1 to H6. Where H1 is normally the main theme of the page and sections are structured in a hierarchy going through the levels to H2, H3 (if necessary), etc. Outside of title tags, they're recognized as one of the most important factors for user experience, making text digestible, and on-site SEO.

This new report in The Crawl Tool was developed to give you an easy over-view of how a site is using header tags. Rather than visiting every page and checking the source code, it's now as simple as opening a report on a crawled site.

The report shows you the page title, which is useful to know as depending on your keyword targets you may or may not want to repeat the title in the H1. It then lists the contents of the first H1, H2, and H3 on the page. Useful for knowing what the page is about.

A unique feature of header tags is that they are a non-enforced hierarchy. There's nothing to stop you jumping from an H2 to an H6, for example, it's just not as effective. Further in the HTML source code, there's no enforcement of this structure. This means that dynamic sites, in particular, have trouble with producing a good structure.

For this reason we developed the "structure" field. This scans through the pages and lists h1, h2,.., h6 tags in order as a string. This provides an at a glance view of a page's header structure. Additionally the "filter text" box is useful here to look for lost opportunities - for example you could try searching "h1 h3" and in any results that h3 could very likely better be an h2! This is one of "The Crawl Tools" uniquely powerful features. Find missed opportunities with header tags that are otherwise very difficult to find.