This post just had to be written. Somehow we have a chapter about Heading tags in all (!) our site reviews. Usually the website owner can’t change a single thing about the heading setup of the website, as he is unwilling or just lacks the knowledge to change the theme of the website. But heading tags do matter.
There are two ways heading tags can structure your content. In classic HTML, there would be one H1 heading tag on each page, maybe a couple of H2 heading tags etc and these would all combine to form an outline of the entire document.
In HTML5, each sectioning tag (for instance section and article) starts again with an H1. This was done to make it easier to combine several components onto one page and still have a valid outline. It makes sense from a clearly theoretical perspective, but it’s lots harder to understand and we generally recommend against using it. This article explains what’s “wrong” with it.
Structuring the entire page
In the case of HTML4, it seems logical to use one H1 per page, of course being the main title of that page. In most cases, that’s not your brand name or website name (on your homepage it probably is, and that’s fine). On this page on yoast.com, it’s “Headings and why you should use them”. That is what this content is about. I’m not going to talk about Yoast here, so no need to make that the H1, right? Here’s what Matt Cutts has to say about it:
On a category page that H1 would be the category name and on a product page the product name. It’s not that hard, indeed. That is why we still recommend using the H1 this way.