i c there are mixed opinion regarding H1 tag while some saying its important and some saying not. the purpose of H1 tag is to tell search engines which is the header line. when you hand code your site using notepad, you dont have any option to deceorate the texts for which you use H1 tag to make the font bigger and bold. idea is to get that header line stand out from the rest of the body content. same result can be obtained by using an html editor (frontgae, dreamweaver, whatever) to increase the size of the text and to make it bold faced. it will still stand out form the rest of the content and with advanced algo search engines have these days, they will be able to pick up the difference. google can tell which words are bold faced or italic and once upon a time, making the keywords bold or italic had some onpage optimization value. google now can tell if you match your text color with background color to hide the text so they read the font colors to compare the color combination on the site. if they can read the font colors, bold, italic, etc on the site, they can surely read the header text being 16 font (for example) compared to the rest of the text being 10 font size. forget the fonts, google can now read flash files as well. with so much advancement on google algo, it is hard to believe that we need to still use the premative H1 tag to let google know which one is the header text. as long as the header line has bigger font than the rest of the body content and singled out at the beginning of the body, google will be able to tell the difference.
It's beter to use the H1 one time on the top on the page sclose behind the <body> tag. And of course put some good keyword in it you want to be fount with!
you use CSS to style your text - NOT font styling within WYSIWYG editors you are completely wrong in everything you just said. heading tags are used outside of SEO purposes to structure your document according to sections i.e. main heading, sub-heading and so fourth. even if you have a website that doesnt belong in google (i.e. an intranet page) you should still use heading tags as it's good practice.
H1 and H2 tags etc are meant for the search engines, not people. The h1 tag is meant to define a major heading similar to the name of a chapter in a book. The H2 would be a sub paragraph to tell the search engines that this is another section, and is related to the H1, but is slightly less important. This is a way to help the search engines. From a people perspective, you define the size, style and font for readability purposes. I would have the name of a Chapter at a 16 point font for H1, a subheader would be smaller at 14 point font and the text at 12 point. Very easy to read for a person, but does not tell the bots what is going on. You Never have more than 1 H1 tag on the same page, just as you never have 2 chapters together in a book. It makes sense to have one H1 tag and several H2 and H3 tags. Thanks for the link and I will read it. But, unless Mr Google comes out and clearly states that the H1, H2 tags mean absolutely nothing, I will continue to use them. Simply for the fact that nobody knows for sure, and that mine and your opinion are just those..Just as everyone else's opinion.) While I like SEOmoz, they are not an authority, and certainly not a google authority which is who we have to play with. In other words, who is to say if their opinion is any better than yours or mine)
There is a lot of terrible advice flying about in this topic. heading tags existed BEFORE the phenomenom that is SEO and they are ultimately more important for good practice than they are for search engine purposes. Even if google said there was no SEO benefit, I would expect you to still use them in order to create semantically correct markup. most of the people in this thread need to learn the basics of web page design and html!!!!!
Yes, i use h1 tag & also other five tags in HTML. The different six html heading. <h1>this is heading</h1> <h2>this is heading</h2> <h3>this is heading</h3> <h4>this is heading</h4> <h5>this is heading</h5> <h6>this is heading</h6>
yes i also use h1 and h2 tag in my content , with u can tell google spider about main topic in content and google give more important on these topic, in u can also include your target keywords and increase keywords ranking.
I don't know upto what extent this info is true that spiders don't give value to h1 tags? But I have been and still I am using h1 tags for heading and I think they have importance on page as well as I think they are important for crawlers too. Like for example if we have used keyword in H1 tag, I think spiders will give more importance to that keyword on that page.
Yes, I definitely use them - to give the page sections hierarchy SEO wise, but rarely go past h4 h tags also help with accessibility, screen readers can read them out to blind users.
Personally, yes... I use the H1, H2, H3 tags, etc whenever I remember to and just set their font, size, weight, etc. through CSS. From what I've read it helps the search engines figure out what the important bits are on the page.