Why Change Your Headings From H3 to H2?

You'd be surprised to learn that, if you look into the source of the blogger pages for individual posts, you'd see that the headings are h3. I was investigating google search results where my blog was appearing on page 1 when I realized that! I'd think google would understand that and treat them as most important headings in the post for SEO purposes. But does it? And moreover, do other search engines understand that a h3 header is actually the main header of the post? I wonder where my blogger pages would be if all post titles were h1 instead of h3!

Ideally, you would want to change all post titles to h1 however in blogger, h1 is "reserved" for the blog title. We want to avoid more than one h1 item, based on several advice on the internet. But we don't want h3 either. So we go for h2.
If you don't want to play guessing games with search engines, you'll change this with me. Here's how.

Go Settings/Layout/Edit Html/Expand Widget Templates. Search for post.title and you'll find something like that:


<b:if cond='data:post.title'>
      <h3 class='post-title entry-title'>
     <b:if cond='data:post.link'>
       <a expr:href='data:post.link'><data:post.title/></a>
     <b:else/>
        <b:if cond='data:post.url'>
          <a expr:href='data:post.url'><data:post.title/></a>
        <b:else/>
          <data:post.title/>
        </b:if>
     </b:if>
      </h3>
    </b:if>


Go ahead and replace h3 with h2:


<b:if cond='data:post.title'>
      <h2 class='post-title entry-title'>
     <b:if cond='data:post.link'>
       <a expr:href='data:post.link'><data:post.title/></a>
     <b:else/>
        <b:if cond='data:post.url'>
          <a expr:href='data:post.url'><data:post.title/></a>
        <b:else/>
          <data:post.title/>
        </b:if>
     </b:if>
      </h2>
    </b:if>


Save your template and you're done! Just to make sure, you only changed 2 digits total! Simple as that!

Credit for the code change directions goes to: http://www.magznetwork.com/tutorials/complete-seo-guide-for-blogger-templates.html

[UPDATE] Well, it turns out this is not the end of the story. Turns out all the widgets in the sidebar have H2 headers also by default! Went ahead and changed all of those to H5! This will improve the SEO I am sure! It's quite a few more changes - two changes for each widget - but these changes are also simple changes. I recommend you do that too!