Page Structure
Today I’m nailing down the page structure for a new set of sites that I’m working on and a key part of that is asking “what gets denoted h1, h2, etc.”? I perused several HTML and design forums looking for discussion on the subject, but did not find answers that seemed practical. A model that kept coming up was that your h1 or h2 should mimic your title tag. If your title tag follows the convention of “site name - page name” this is problematic as these are two distinct elements that should be marked separately.
So… I started visiting sites that I know are marked up pretty well and have come up with the following convention. H1 will always be the site name, therefore h1 on every page will be the same. H2 will be the page name. I will have one h1 and usually one h2. I could see multiple instances of h2 where there are elements on the page that are not related to the page topic (navigation, etc.). From there on, the headers should simply be nested in a logical fashion.