As the name suggests these are the headings within the content of the website and there are two ways of creating them. From a search engine optimisation perspective there is a right way and a wrong way of creating headings. The right way will improve your rankings if you include your target keywords and synonyms in the headings.

The Wrong Way

This is a very common mistake and includes using bold, italics, font size to modify body text to designate headings in the content. Or even worse using images of text for headings.

The Right Way

Use the standard html heading tags to designate headings e.g. <h1>heading 1</h1>, <h2>heading 2</h2>…

The reason people choose the wrong way is that it is easier (I just did it above tut tut) and looks better than the unmodified heading tags which look pretty ugly. The solution is to apply the styles to the heading tags making them look exactly how you want. You can do this on a heading by heading basis or you can define them in a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), which is the preferred option.

Although not specifically related to SEO, the correct use of heading tags is essential for creating an accessible website as it makes it much easier to use a screen reader.