Best Practices: Page content structure

To make your website visitor's experience as easy as possible, it is important to make your content easily accessible - which means easy to read and easy to follow. This is also important for Search Engine Optimisation purposes, as it shows the Search Engines that your content is of a good quality.

You should therefore ensure that the text content of your pages follows a coherent and hierarchical structure. Pages should usually be made of headings and paragraphs.

Headings

The consensus in the world-wide web is that there are 6 headings, going from 1 to 6, in order of decreasing importance (1 being most important). They are commonly referred to as "H1" to "H6", as this is what the tag is called in the HTML code of the page.

On Seeds CMS, when you edit text content in a zone or snippet, you can select which heading you wish to use from the Headings menu in the editor toolbar shown when you focus on the editable content.

You should use the headers in their established hierarchical order i.e. if you have already used an "H1" and you have another sub-title on your page, then it should be "H2", and so on. 

Note that search engines such as Google use the H1 tag to determine the content of your page, so it is important to ensure your page has one H1 tag (and one only!), which ideally contains the important keywords relating to the rest of the content of your page. Having more than one H1 could potentially confuse search engine crawler robots.

If you wish to have your content's (sub-)titles in a different font to the main text on the page, then speak to your developer who will be able to add this to your styling options.

There are many articles on the web about content writing, but this one specifically explains how to structure your content and your headings.

Paragraphs

You can have as many paragraphs on the page as you wish, and it is commonly recommended to break up your content regularly on the page into easily 'digested' chunks. In practice, that means having more short paragraphs which may only contain 2-3 sentences, rather than a few long paragraphs as you might see in printed text. 

Another common error when editing web content is the confusion of multiple line breaks versus paragraphs.

In Seeds CMS's inline editors (and in many other CMS editors), when you press enter i.e. carriage return, it will normally create a new paragraph automatically. If you press enter at the same time as holding the shift key, instead of creating a paragraph, the editor will insert a new line break. There are two differences:

  1. structural - a paragraph could contain multiple line breaks
  2. visual - paragraphs are usually styled with some margin (blank space) above or below them to make the page's content easier to read.

As a rule of thumb: To help your readers and the Search Engine robots to follow the meaning of your content, it is best to press enter / carriage return to create a new paragraph whenever you are moving on to a new point. Line breaks should be used if you are still referring to the same idea as the rest of the preceding paragraph.