Can anyone tell me what a proper h1 and h2 tag should include? Is the text always bold on headings? I see some coding where the h1 tags are spread all through the html. Any advice will be appreciat.
The "h" tags are heading tags. Its like a newspaper- the heading describes the main subject of the content. Search engines will find titles you have within your h1, h2 tags, etc. and log these as the main ideas of your page. So, if your heading tags include keywords you want to rank well for, it will help your SERPs. You can modify your .css file to style the heading font any way you want to. Hope this helps.
thats right.. usually header tags use on some titles for a particular content... it would be easy for a reader to identify the main topic of certain content..
Heading tags aren't designed to be stuffed with keywords, you would use a heading tags on a paragraph\content title or description above the content.
For semantic html, the h1 is generally intended to format the title of the page within the content and there should be only one. From an SEO standpoint, if you're using multiple h1s on the same keywords, you're overoptimizing and it's obvious. If you're using multiple h1s on different keywords, your optimization isn't focused enough. Use h2s as sub-topics that ideally include variations of the keywords in your h1. I think h tags should be used very similarly to the structure of an outline: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline