Page and paragraph headings.

Hey,
I just started to read a bit about SEO. I read a few webpages which said that words in the h1 and h2 tags, etc are considered more important by search engines.

Now i started to wonder if:
1. This is truly the case?
2. Is it really about the <Hx> tags or is it about text size in general.

Im wondering since on my webpage i dont make use of the h1 tag at all, instead i use a css class and mark all paragraph headings like this:


In the class i specify the text to be bigger.

Does this give the same results as H1?
I guess it doesn't make much of a differnce but im curious.

Thanks in advance.

1) Yes it's true.

2) No, the displaying of the html is irrelevant. It's the meaning of the tags that matter.

So with css using: font-size: 15pt; means the same as for example <h1> ?

nopes, using a <H1> implies that you want to emphasize it, so therefore it carries more relevence than the same graphical representation.

ay too bad

Could i do something like this:

<h2>Paragraph title</h2>

And in css:



Or can this be penalized?

As long as it really is a header you'll be fine. If it isn't a header and you're just trying to fool the search engines, if you get caught you risk penalty or banning.

Ah ok, i thought maybe their crawlers can see i use css to make the text smaller and then automaticaly penalize it.

I could also use the h3 and h4 tags to get the size i prefer but in that case if i ever wanted to change the size of all paragraph headers at the same time i would have to change every page. So now i just want to pick one header and set the text size for it.

thanks!

ermm, just a fair warning you said "pick one header and set the text size for it." If you are using several headers on the same page then you SHOULD use several <Hx> headers and by all means make them look the same as eachother, thats ok but don't use <H1> and <H2> headers more than once on any page, it would take the OOomph out of it :-P

H1 heading tags should be used only once. H2 can be used multiple times since they are sub headings and multiple subheading are very common and normal to have.

Well, yes, you CAN do it like that, but its more effective to use <H2><H3><H4> with the same keyword

H1 tags have been widely misused and exploited by SPAMMY websites.

Over the years, search engines are giving less important to SEO ranking purpose of H1, but it can help Google to navigate important sections of your website.

In between 2005-06, there were several high ranking websites which were exploiting H1 to the extreme. Some of these websites were repeating same H1 tag over 100 times. This is the reason why Google/Yahoo are not giving it much importance while granting rankings for any particular keyword.