Best practice is to use H* elements as you would were you writing an outline. Use the H1 tag one time only, at the top of your page and closely match the head TITLE element. From there continue using H* elements in a logical progression and P elements to fill-in the meat.

As long as you can honestly tell yourself that you are not attempting to deceive anyone you can safely use CSS to format your H* elements to your hearts desire. The people who program Google et al appreciate good design I cannot imagine that they would penalize a web site just because the H1 elements are smaller than the H2 elements. For example, I have one template where the H1 element is in a normal paragraph size font, but it is at the top of each page above the banner where it clearly indicates this is the subject of my page. That template has several top rankings.

Google does spider CSS files so it would be unwise to assume that they do not cross-reference files. Even if they are not cross-referencing today it is a safe bet that they will in the future, so be sure not to create a design today that could tank your website tomorrow. For example, setting a margin to place text off the visible page screams penalize me.

Hi Komodo Tale:

Thank you, I understand your comments and I am using H* in a correct manner.

I am having a hard time understanding comments that I read in this forum such as: "I am not doing anything spammy, no H1 or anything like that."

I seem to read that often on this site, why would someone refer to H1 use as being spammy?

Some people have used H1 not to tag their main headline but to wrap a keyword (or 20) here and there. For quite a while (this is years back) the H1 tag was so abused that Google stopped considering it a signal of relevance altogether for a while.

There are both good and spammy ways to use almost any code.

"why would someone refer to H1 use as being spammy"

Why would anyone stick their tongue against a frozen lamp post? Some people do and say silly things.

Calling H* "spammy" is like saying electrical wiring in a house is "spammy". It's just crazy talk. Naturally you can use anything improperly, like putting 500 words in an H1 tag, but there is nothing at all "spammy" about using H* tags properly.

Ater years and years of allowing other factors to outvote the LACK of H* tags, I believe that these latest hits over the past few weeks show a resurgence in the importance of the first H1 tag. I think this is the start of G beginning to apply proper H* formatting demands on the SERPs. These last few rounds were lightly applying page and site degrades for pages without H1 tags. So no no no, do not overlook these tags and run them through a validator to keep your discipline. Because they are back and now that G is smarter, they are not going away.

I believe that these latest hits over the past few weeks show a resurgence in the importance of the first H1 tag.

Please expound.

For example, I have one template where the H1 element is in a normal paragraph size font, but it is at the top of each page above the banner where it clearly indicates this is the subject of my page.

I am not so sure that using an H1 in normal paragraph size is how it was intended to be used. I would have thought that strictly speaking (as per W3C standards) an H1 should really be the largest text on the page.

I would have thought that strictly speaking (as per W3C standards) an H1 should really be the largest text on the page.

I see this issue very differently, BDW. The look of the font is merely an aesthetic consideration. I work with many sites where the H1 element is the same font size as the rest of the text, but it still clearly delineates the page's headline - the topic of the whole document.

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.

The global structure of an HTML document [w3.org] - W3C page

The W3C just observes how browsers usually work -- but the defaults for any/all HTML elements are not supposed to be hurdles that we are required to work around. The W3C even created CSS intentionally so that there can be a more complete separation of content and its presentation by any user agent, including the visual browsers.

I agree Ted but as you said, I was merely pointing out,

Visual browsers usually render more important headings in larger fonts than less important ones.

CSS obviously limits the format of H1s only to your imagination but there may be a time when SEs are able to separate misuse from aesthetics?

Couple of relevant threads from the past:

Increasing search results position [webmasterworld.com]

H tags to structure site map? [webmasterworld.com]

So far I see this applying only to 2-word combinations. If you sift through the source files of some of these phrases you monitor and search for the h1 tags, I think you will start to make some interesting observations. Somewhere in the results, I bet you'll see the use of the h1 tag start to fall off or be used wildly wrong. The deeper you go in the results, the h1 just ceases to be utilized. Of course, this is not the only factor. But I do think as I said earlier that this is the first pass being made over the results to include the H1 tag as a member of the forumula.

My site was built mostly in 2000-2001 using a WYSIWYG Editor, and it didn't use H tags, just font sizes, bold, etc. I am getting ready to redo this site in CSS, and played with one page adding H tags directly to the page.

I didn't change any of the text on the page, I just added H tags to the text on the page that defined the page, which was also the same as the title of the page. I added an H2 and an H3 to relevant text, never more than 5 words, and the page dropped like crazy. This was the only change I made.

I removed all the H tags, and the page returned to its previous rankings.

That told me that if I'm going to add CSS to this particular site, I will have to do it in an external manner, and not on page.

I do have other pages on the site that have been CSS for a long time, with the code on the page, and they rank fine. So, I'm not sure what this exercise proved to me, if anything, other than I need to be careful when I do finally update the site.

I hear what you're saying Andy but it's not logical. Proper use of H tags should not damage a site's rank.