Should my h1 be my logo or the next title in my page?

Question

I've always struggled with this decision, and I wanted to know if there are any structural or semantic reasons for handling it properly:

So consider that most sites have a logo (sometimes referred to as a masthead), I typically use an h1 for this element, then hide the text for that object, as it's usually an image.

But then the situation arises where I'll have a real title on the page, in our case say it's "Products", should this then be an h2? or should it be an h1? I was taught that you shouldn't have more than one h1 on the page, but it seems to be the most important as the h1 will never change.

Are there any SEO considerations or other reasons that I'd want to handle this in a certain way? Any input would be appreciated.

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To clarify, when I say I hide the text, I usually would make the logo the background-image in my CSS, then I typically hide the text with the ol' text-indent:-99999px. I always thought this was the best way to make google index it properly.

Answer 1

I would like to begin this by saying that I am no expert on this matter, this is only what I have been told by a number of sources.

I believe that the h1 tag should only be used for titles. The reason being that they are a great SEO tool. The h1 is a high ranking element in terms of the relevance of a page.

Placing an h1 around an image does nothing for your page, unless as you say, you place some descriptive text in it. The problem with placing hidden text inside an h1 tag is that the Google bots are smarter than that. They will either omit the tag entirely or place you on the blacklist (usually more than one instance needs to occur for this, but generally it's a bad idea to try and elevate your search rankings with hidden elements, meta tags excluded).

So, place your "products" heading in an h1. On any additional pages which don't have titles, I would place a descriptive sentence from the page inside of an h1, and style it to match the surrounding text. This will ensure that the bots know that the words within the tag are relavent to the page.

Edit: for OP Edit

Regardless of whether you use display:none or left-margin:-99999px, it's still not a good idea. That is a common way to hide text or elements, and I'm sure that it's not new to google ;)