It seems like most of my pages’ <h1> are merely copy of the title of the page.
For example my home page might be
<h1>Welcome to Bades Design!</h1>
Or my contact Page is like
<h1>Contact Us at Bades Design</h1>
Are there better suggestions out there? Maybe I’m not using correct content? I’m trying to be as efficient as possible when it comes to SEO stuff.
[This is really an SEO question, so I’ve moved it hither.]
One thing to consider is what people are likely to search for. Are people going to look for web services by typing the word ‘welcome’? Are they going to type your business name? (They may well do.) If they are more likely to find you by searching for web design services, it’s worth putting something like that in your titles. It depends on how you expect to be found.
That’s kind of what I figured. I guess if I want a welcome message I’ll just put it in a <p> then.
Thanks
That sounds like a better idea. It’s tempting to focus on your business name in the title, too, but I suspect that only works well if you are really well known. I guess it’s a balance between getting your name out there and making it clear what you actually do.
These days I tend to put the business name in a link at the top of the page and focus on page titles (using the <title> element) that describe the page content. Perhaps at the end of the title element I put the business name. (However, I shouldn’t be advising on SEO, as I hate it TBH. 
)
To be frank, the question itself tends to indicate misuse of the tag in question. Numbered heading tags exist to provide logical structure to your document, being the start of subsections. The H1 is the parent heading, of which all sub-headings are by definitions subsections of – which is why I usually have JUST the site title in my h1’s and try to get it in my content BEFORE any other body level content; since everything on the page is by definition a subsection of H1. You end up with a H2 called “advertisement” in a sidebar and another h2 called “tag cloud”, that’s not a subsection of “welcome to” – they are kin to it.
It’s like the people who skip down to h4 or h5’s for things that are siblings – not children – of the content area headings, or have h2’s or h3’s before they even have a h1 – they don’t “get” the point of headings.
The text you describe sounds like it should be a h2 to me on those grounds – though to be honest I’ve always HATED “welcome to” text on websites. Way too impersonal and often little more than a waste of bandwidth.
Of course this was moved to the SEO area, where everyone is going to tell you to go ahead and ignore the entire point of HTML and the semantic meanings of tags for black-hat SEO scam bull that’s more likely to get you blacklisted than to build a proper accessible website people will want to visit.
I mean, at that point you might as well have gibberish markup like:
<h1>Our three main web services include:</h1>
<ul>
<h2>Website Design</h2>
<h2>Web Application Development</h2>
<h2>Web Marketing</h2>
</ul>
In case you don’t know, the only valid children of a UL are LI, and those aren’t headings so why are they H2?
or non-semantic wrecks like:
<div id="header">
<a href="/" title=" "><img src="http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/images/logo.png" alt="Bades Design Main Logo"/></a>
<p id="tagline">Good Design. Practical Development. Smart Marketing.</p>
<p id="toplinks"><a href="about.html">About</a> | <a href="contact.php">Contact</a></p>
</div><!-- End of header -->
Which I’d have as a h1, small tag inside the h1 for the tagline, and a UL for the list of links… with no pointless wrapping DIV around them…
… and that’s before we talk the accessibility train wreck of those PX metric fonts on the content areas and semi-broken fixed width layout.
Yep just saw that, it wasn’t intentional. Fixed.
IT sounds like you’re suggesting use a h1 in my header? Why would you set an h1 in the header that appears on every page? h1’s should be different on every page…?
Not sure why my fixed width layout is “broken” either.