H1 tags, SEO and semantics

Question

I'm using the H1 tag in my document as the main title, as you do. The text in the H1 is the title of the company, which needs to be shown on every page. I'm using the H2 tag for the title of the main content on each page. So the H1 is the same on every page, and the H2 changes.

Example http://dev.darrenhall.info/temp/stackoverflow/h1/h1.gif

I know that a lot of sites use the H1 to do what I'm doing with the H2, am I losing out by not doing this? I know that semantically I can't make the H1 into a H2 and vice versa, so I'm wondering what the best option is. Does it matter that my H1 is always the same? Any advice is appreciated! Thanks!

Darren.

Answer 1

You should use h1 for the page title, not the company name. Just put the company name in a div and style it to look like a headline.

For SEO purposes the company name is not partically relevant for the page. It's more important to get varied headlines for the pages, so that search engines doesn't think that all your pages are simply different versions of the same page.

Using the company name as headline means that you reduce the relevance of the page title, making it less likely that search engines index the pages on the keywords.

The exception is of course the main page of the site, where it makes sense to have the company name being the most relevant information.