http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.5.5 According to the spec: A heading element briefly describes the topic of the section it introduces. Heading information may be used by user agents, for example, to construct a table of contents for a document automatically. There are six levels of headings in HTML with H1 as the most important and H6 as the least. Visual browsers usually render more important headings in larger fonts than less important ones. Now for good document structure, it's generally expected for the h1 element to appear first and subsequent heading elements after; h1 | ----h2 | ----h3 | ----h3 | ----h4 | ----h2 | ----h3 Code (markup): But what if the document structure means your h1 element is not at the top of a page? It happens a lot, the semantic meaning of your document is the article title 1/4 of the way into the source structure, rather than the more conventional, but less semantically correct;<h1>brand name</h1>. However this creates a problem, you may have other heading elements before this, for the navigation, etc. Ending, perhaps, with a structure like so: ----h4 | ----h3 | ----h3 ----h2 | h1 | ----h2 | ----h3 Code (markup): So what do you do?
Visually, you can change the various hx tags with CSS but apart from that i'm stumped. Although, I have a suspiscion that this doesn't matter, hence the numbers to show importance of heading.
Personally I often do use the h1-heading for the brand-name, especially if it does have important keywords in there. But if not - there is no harm in having the h1 tag a little down the page.
You think so? I wonder what happens if I put it through a document structure parser, see what it makes of the site. Anyone got a link to those? The ones that find the meaning of your web pages from the heading structure?