H2 tag

How H2 tags fit the heading outline

The heading elements run <h1> through <h6>, from the top-level page title down to the deepest subsection. An H2 sits directly under the H1 and marks each main section. MDN’s rule is blunt: “Do not skip heading levels: always start from <h1>, followed by <h2> and so on.” Jumping from H1 to H3 confuses screen reader users, who navigate by hopping heading to heading.

A clean outline looks like this:

<h1>Complete guide to cold brew</h1>
<h2>Choosing your beans</h2>
<h2>Grind size and ratio</h2>
  <h3>Coarse vs medium grind</h3>
<h2>Steep time</h2>

Google’s position is worth pinning down. In its SEO Starter Guide, Google says to “provide headings to help users navigate your pages,” and treats heading count as a judgment call: “if you think it’s too much, then it probably is.” Semantic order helps accessibility more than ranking: from Search’s view “it doesn’t matter if you’re using them out of order.” So the payoff from good H2s is mostly indirect. They make a page scannable, clarify what each section covers, and give AI answer engines clean passage boundaries to quote. Practitioners like Yoast advise that each H2 cover one distinct aspect of the topic, so a reader skimming only the H2s still grasps the whole article.