You can leave the tags as H1 you just need to add some styling. In between the head tags put this: <style>h1 {font-size: 9px;}</style> You can change the font size to whatever suits, H1 tags will out weight other 'H' tags you use on a page.
Did you put the <style>h1 {font-size: 9px;}</style> in between your <head> tags? Or you can do it this way: <h1 style="font-size: 9px;">H1 TEXT</h1> Hope that helps.
I just put it into the CSS portion of the site, that may be my problem. I'll try the second option you provided, seems easier to work with. Thanks