I have read various blogs and forums which suggest that many site designers dont bother to use H1 tags however they can be useful in SEO purposes.

I am planning to use them on {my site} although I am puzzled as to why they are not widely used.

Header tags are the 2nd most important tag next to title. Try to put similar text in your h1 and page title, and use that same text on the page to tie it all together.

What about if I put a h2 tag in and not a h1 tag, would this not be as effective?

David - Advertiserbay

If you need multiple headers, certainly use h2, h3 ... h6 etc. Don't put whole paragraphs in a header and don't use (ie) multiple h1 headers on the same page.

Search engines don't put much, if any, weight on H tags anymore, no matter if they are H1, H2, H3 whatever. A study just came out to prove this, read more here: {Link Removed}

If I recall correctly, googlebots used to use H1 tags to weigh the "importance" of text on a page - so they were, at one point, perceived as beneficial from an SEO standpoint. However, when google saw that webmasters were abusing H1 tags to emphasize keywords and manipulate search rankings, they stopped using them as a ranking influence. Nowadays, all an H1 tag does is tell Google that you are using a heading. It has no impact on how your site will rank.

Header tags may not carry as much SEO weight as they used to but personally, I'm not removing any and will continue to use them at least for organization and global styling ... but I'm an old school coder

I am curious to know why you didn't say "I am planning to use them on my site...". Could it be that you are trying to get around the rule about publicizing your website in the forums???

I think it is.

MktgRob I'd also remove the link from your quote.

OK so if h1 tags are not really rated much anymore then what is? I am new to HTML and need to make sure my new site has the best SEO and performs well in rankings. Any help in this area would be appreciated, thanks in advance.