Body copy gets most of the attention when people talk about on-page SEO, but two smaller elements do a disproportionate amount of the work in telling search engines what a page — and the pages it links to — are actually about: anchor text and heading tags.
Heading Tags: The Page's Own Table of Contents
Heading tags (H1 through H6) create a structural outline of a page, both for readers scanning it and for search engines parsing it. A page with one clear H1 and logically nested subheadings is far easier to understand — and far easier to feature in rich results — than a wall of unstructured text.
- H1 should appear once per page and clearly describe what the page is about
- H2s break the page into its main sections
- H3s and below nest under the relevant H2 for further breakdown
A well-structured heading hierarchy also makes a page more likely to be pulled into featured snippets, since it gives search engines a clean, pre-organized answer to lift from.
Anchor Text: Context for the Link, Not Just a Click Target
Anchor text is the clickable text of a link, and it tells both users and search engines what to expect on the other end. "Click here" tells them nothing. "Our guide to composting at home" tells them exactly what they're about to get — for both internal links and the backlinks pointing into your site.
A Simple Framework
- Structure every page with exactly one H1 that clearly states the topic
- Break the page into logical sections using H2s, and nest further detail under H3s where needed
- Replace generic anchor text ("click here," "read more," "this page") with descriptive text wherever it appears
- Vary anchor text naturally across different links rather than repeating one exact phrase everywhere
> Tip: Read a page's headings alone, top to bottom, with the body text hidden. If that outline alone doesn't make sense as a summary of the page, the heading structure needs work.
Common Mistakes
- Using multiple H1s per page, or skipping heading levels (H2 straight to H4) with no logical reason
- Choosing heading sizes based on how they look visually rather than their actual structural level, and fixing it with CSS instead of proper tags
- Defaulting to "click here" as anchor text out of habit
- Using the exact same anchor text for every link pointing to a given page, which can look manipulated rather than natural
Running a page through a meta tags analyzer alongside a manual heading review is a fast way to catch structural gaps that are easy to miss just by looking at the rendered page.
Neither of these elements is flashy, and neither takes long to fix. But they're read by every crawler that visits the page and every user deciding whether to click a link — worth getting right by default, not as an afterthought.