Your headings should tell a story

In 2008, a good friend and I were publishing the Regina Streets Magazine when we ran into a perfectly predictable problem. Some writers are amazing and incredibly reliable. Others are not so reliable. And with a fixed publishing schedule, that often meant Stacey and I were six pages of content short with less than 24 hours before we had to get RSM to Eagle Printing.

And so, Stacey and I wrote a lot of articles, often about things we did not know much about and often under pseudonyms. As an aside, those nicotine-and-caffeine-addled late nights in our bedrooms, firing article drafts back and forth across the apartment, were some of the most deliriously creative experiences of my life.

As is often the case for me, necessity led to innovation.

In this case, I honed a writing technique that also works as a pretty good way to analyze writing. The technique is simple: start with the headings.

Create an outline with the headings. Start filling in points. Figure out a title. Then refine the headings until they tell a coherent narrative. With a bit more work, you have an article.

That refining step is likely the most important part of the whole process. If your headings make sense, if they are coherent, and if the text flows naturally from heading to heading, your article is much more likely to be coherent too.

Start with the headings

When you apply that same method to web content analysis, you start in the same place: the headings.

First, look at them in the order they appear on the page.

Do they tell a coherent story? Can you understand what the page is trying to say before reading every paragraph? Do the headings move from one idea to the next, or do they feel like a pile of disconnected labels?

Then test the structure another way.

Take the headings and group them by level. Put the H1 by itself, the H2 headings together, and the H3 headings together. Can you still infer the general order of the page? Can you still see the structure?

That second test is useful because good articles tend to have headings that flow into each other. The H2s should usually describe the main movement of the page. The H3s should support their parent sections. If the grouped headings still make sense, that is a good sign that the page has a real structure underneath the prose.

Why this is important

Headings form a page’s published outline.

They are the skeleton that tells readers, screen readers, crawlers, editors, and nicotine-and-caffeine-addled magazine publishers what the page is trying to say.

They are the stops in the road. They are your article’s landmarks. They are your reader’s anchor points.

I do not mean anchor points in the strict HTML sense, although those anchors can be useful too. I mean mental anchor points. Headings help a reader understand where they are in the article. They help reinforce the central point. They explain why the next section exists.

This section, for example, is called “Why this is important.” And now I am telling you why.

That is the job.

Headings do not have to be fancy. They do not have to be extremely creative. They do not have to be packed with keywords or written like calls to action. They need to help the reader understand what they are reading and why the next section belongs where it does.

A quick way to analyze a page

If you want a fast way to analyze a web page, start with this method:

1. List all the headings in order.
2. Ask whether they tell a coherent story.
3. Group the headings by level.
4. Ask whether you can still infer the page’s structure.

The last step matters more than it may seem.

If your headings flow into each other, writing the rest of the article becomes easier. You are no longer trying to write from beginning to end in one heroic march. You are writing from heading to heading.

As the young people say, “all” is doing a lot of work there, because writing paragraphs is still hard. But it is easier to write from one clear heading to the next than it is to stare at a blank page and try to summon an entire article out of the fog.

What Siteimp shows

This is why Siteimp includes a heading outline view.

The goal is not to judge whether your writing is beautiful. The goal is to show the page’s structure as evidence.

Siteimp collects the headings from a page’s HTML and shows them in a few different ways:

• an overview of heading counts
• the page title
• the number of H1 and H2 headings
• structural observations
• the published outline in page order
• the same headings grouped by level

That gives you two useful views of the same content.

The published outline shows how the page unfolds from top to bottom. The grouped-by-level view shows the structural shape of the page without the full reading order.

Together, they make it easier to ask practical questions:

• Is there one clear H1?
• Do the H2 headings describe the main sections?
• Do the H3 headings support the sections above them?
• Are headings repeated?
• Are headings vague?
• Are headings written only as keyword buckets?
• Can the page’s argument be understood from the outline?

That is structural evidence, not editorial judgment.

A human still has to decide whether the writing works. Siteimp simply makes the outline easier to inspect.

Conclusion

Your headings do not have to be fancy, unique, or full of buzzwords. They need to serve as mental anchors. They should help move the article along, demonstrate order, and reinforce that the reader understands what you are talking about.

It takes practice to learn how to do that. But if you use a method and keep applying it to your own writing, you will start to develop your own style.

Look at your headings. Put them in order. Ask whether they tell a coherent story on their own.

It does not have to be a great story, but it has to lead from beginning to end.