Between my reading on the subject of SEO and some comments on a forum that I frequent, I came to the conclusion that using an h1 tag for the site name is a waste of a good semantic tag in most cases. The  dilemma being that the site name is too generic and will likely not apply equally and relevantly to all pages. In further reading I ran across an author that felt the same about the semantical use of the h1 tag. From a semantical standpoint it would seem that the h1 tag should more closely align with the page title than the site name.

I had considered dumping the site name into a ‘p’ tag and making some conditional styling statements for a paragraph in the header block. This is easy to implement and seems to work fine. The other author thought of putting the site name in a div with an innovative id like site_name, and applying the styling to the div. This may be a better approach as there is indication in the code as to the purpose of the content of the div.

I had written an article for Selling on Your Website about HTML Semantics, so I implemented the change to the site_name div first on that site. I will probably go through and change this on some other sites now. On some of my sites I will wait for the regular update cycle to make the change. Any new sites will probably follow the new program. I will be watching my traffic analytics to see if I can identify any change in the traffic pattern that could be attributed to the change in philosophy.

I have been studying a bit about SEO and recently added an article called HTML Semantics and SEO to my site Selling on your Website. I was going through my Google WebMaster Tools checking for any problems that Google  had found. I need to pay more attention to webmaster tools. There is a lot of information there. Back to the story, the webmaster tools told me that I was in the 24th position for the search for html semantics. There is a link that performs the search for your term so I checked it out. The search result opened and I went to page three (result 21-30). I looked over the page and did not see my article, so I went on to the next page. There was still no sign of the article. Not really expecting to find anything I checked page two. There was my page listed number two on the second  page of results.