This week I’m talking about document formatting through markup, and specifically the difference between applying labeled styles to your document and just using formatting effects. When you do it right, a little bit of work beforehand can make all your writing easier.

If you’ve set up a WordPress blog, you’ve probably seen this in effect. With blogs (or really any well-made webpage), the styles are built in a stylesheet document called “style.css.” If you know how CSS works, you can scroll through a bunch of code that looks like this:

a {color: #d8d97e; }

a.hover {color: #5e5222; }

a.visited {color: #b34a10; }

And you just see blonde, brunette, redhead….

Ahem. Anyway, the stylesheet defines what labels you have available, and what they look like. In addition to letting you design new styles, it lets you customize the standard styles everyone uses. And, really, those should be your main focus.

How Heading Styles Boost Your S. E. O.

Those standard styles are the ones you’ll use the most. Some of them include:

• <em>
• <strong>
• <a>
• <p>
• <h1>
• <h2>
• <h3>
• <h4>

Those styles at the end, the ones starting with H, are the heading styles. If you wrap a bit of text in H1, it’s going to show up much larger than your normal type, probably bold and quite likely in a different font. As we discussed yesterday, though, it’s more than just font effects — it’s a label which carries meaning.

Specifically, the Heading styles are hierarchical, allowing you to flag the most important ideas in your document and show how those ideas are related. Eventually, if you do it right, all the headings in your document should easily create an outline, like so

<h1>Unstressed Syllables — Writing Advice for Everybody</h1>

<h2>On Markup Languages: My Crisis of Faith</h2>

<h2>On Markup Languages: Labels vs. Effects</h2>

<h3>Paragraph Styles</h3>

<h3>Markup Languages</h3>

<h2>On Markup Languages: How to Use Heading Styles</h2>

<h3>How Heading Styles Boost Your S. E. O.</h3>

<h3>How Heading Styles Save You Headaches</h3>

<h4>Applying the Labels</h4>

<h4>Picking the Right Labels</h4>

<h3>How Heading Styles Build a Book</h3>

That gives you all the benefits of a good document outline that we discussed last week. More importantly, it gives those benefits to Google.

See, when a search engine browses your page to find out what you’re talking about, it pays special attention to certain HTML elements — things like the title, anchor tags, and the various levels of heading style.

What it doesn’t pay attention to is font effects. Google doesn’t care about bold text or larger print. Even if your line looks like a section heading, search engines will ignore it unless it’s wrapped in the <h3>.

How Heading Styles Save You Headaches

Now, admittedly, until you get used to it, it can seem like a little bit more work to flag a heading as a heading instead of just selecting it and hitting Ctrl-B (or clicking the B button at the top of the screen). And even when you’re ready to commit to that, you’ve still got to know what kind of heading you’re supposed to use.

WordPress (like most modern writing software) actually makes it really easy to handle both problems.

Applying the Labels

Next time you’re writing a post in WordPress, look for that easy B button I mentioned in the toolbar above the editing box. Right beneath it, there should be a dropdown box that says “Paragraph.” If you click the box, you’ll see a list of all the available styles, and clicking on Heading 3 is really not much harder than clicking the B.

Of course, you may not have that toolbar. By default, WordPress only shows one row of buttons, but the last button in the list is a toggle that says “Show/Hide Kitchen Sink” if you hover over it. Click that, and BAM! Just like that, you’ve got the tools you need to get your job done.

Picking the Right Labels

Picking the right labels for your headings is just as easy. Remember the outline I showed you above? Most blogs work according to the basic layout, with the website’s title set up as H1 (and you’re only supposed to have one H1 per page, ever). Then your blog post title (or titles, if you’re looking at an index of multiple posts) will each be H2.

Your theme should take care of all the H1s and H2s for you. That means that by the time you’re writing the content of a post, your highest-level headings should be H3. And, really, that should usually be enough to do the job for you (although I sometimes go to H4, as you can see here, and WordPress easily supports all the way down to H6).

How Heading Styles Build a Book

As I said yesterday, paragraph styles are powerful tools in nearly any writing software, not just the markup languages. I’m out of words for today, but come back next week for the story of BookMaker, and how using heading styles in Google Docs has made me into a publishing company.