I have no arguments about using h1 tags like that from the accessibility point of view, however, I don’t think it makes much sense from an SEO point of view.

The reason why, is that most sites have little problem ranking well for their own name or their company name, whether it’s put into h1 tags or not. So why not use the h1 tags to give a little more leverage on key phrases that are more difficult to rank highly for?

It’s a choice, most of the time - best accessibility or best SEO?

I find that by considering the benefits to text-to-speech readers (i.e. looking at the page with no styling at all) we are often also doing the thing that is best for SEO. By making the page make sense to a visually impaired user, it will inevitably also make more sense to a search engine spider.

Thanks for commenting. But I have to disagree with you.

My experience is that headings, properly used, unquestionably have a positive effect - carry SEO weight, if you will. Their effect is already here.

I wondered if I’d get pulled up on that one!

I think I have an answer. Blogs are blogs and I feel you’re kind of caught by having multiple articles on one page. So you have to use h2 for each of the headlines. You can’t use, say, ten h1s.

However, when it comes to Web sites (ie those that are not blogs), my view is that the h1 tag should be used as a key part of the optimisation. So you shouldn’t use it for the company name.

Do you have any thoughts on how you might be able to avoid the structural gotcha with blogs, so that you can use h1s more productively?