I'm pretty new to looking at SEO, having previously left it up to chance, hoping that search engines would reward me for producing valid code. However, I have found myself getting sucked deeper and deeper into it as time goes on. Why? Because I love the idea that good web content is holistic. Good writing that is relevant and well structured, delivered with a brevity of code that makes the page a pleasure to download. Okay, maybe not a pleasure but definitely not a pain.

Working in an advertising agency that is very quickly switching its emphasis to online marketing and delivery of our product means that I have had to hit the ground running. I have been calling on my existing understanding of semantic web development, design and usability and building my SEO knowledge around that core. I was recently engaged in a discussion with a client and their web services manager, and I was astonished to hear the web services manager tell me that they were unwilling to add H1 tags to any of their pages because "Google penalises use of H1 tags instead of H2 tags." He was adamant about this, so I thought I'd have a look around to see where he was getting this idea from.

After searching through a bunch of forums I found this coming up again and again. It struck me that almost universally people who were saying this were missing a huge point of semantic structure. There is a hierarchy of content on a page and many of the people who were complaining (vocally enough to have an "expert" take their observations as fact) where making a rookie mistake in page structure. That was where the "negative" response from search engines kicked in.

The giveaway was people saying that when they changed the H1s on a page to H2s then they performed better... H1s... plural. This is where people seem to have missed the trick - headers are informational not presentational. Each page should contain only one H1 tag but can have any number of H2s and subsequent levels of header tags. By loading a page with numerous H1 tags they are creating a semantically incorrect page with suspicious emphasis on the H1 tag. When they are all switched to H2s then they are "rewarded" by search engines, not because H1s are seen as bad, but because you can have more than one H2 tag on a page and be semantically well formed.

In the rush to find an SEO-based response to the problem, some people seem to have overlooked how their code design can affect their performance in search rankings. Search engines aren't penalising use of H1 tags; they are penalising misuse.