What are H1, H2 & so on in web design?

They are html tags to format the enclosed content (text usually) according to Header 1 and Header 2 style rules (there are 6 headers available in standard html with 1 the largest and 6 the smallest).

The tags have a default style assigned in the web browser that renders the web page, and they can be customized with css

The h1 and h2 tags are important for SEO

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_headings.asp

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=h1+and+seo

Title is the document title as displayed at the top of the browser window, also crucial for SEO. Title can be a static tag in the head of the document or manipulated dynamically.

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_head.asp

What you are talking about is HTML. A Web page has up to three types of code. HTML adds semantic meaning to the content of a page; CSS is used to affect the appearance (on a screen, printer, or whatever); JavaScript is mostly used to add dynamic properties, like a calendar date-picker, for example.

Most browsers have CSS built in. Those H tages you mention are usually bold, for example. But there are substantial differences between the way browsers display the content of these tags, so most of us use a lot of CSS to make things show up the way we want. We can often get away without JavaScript, although it's nice to know about.

There is an excellent set of short, carefully explained tutorials at dev.opera.com. You may like to start with these Basics of HTML.

Hope this helps. Good luck. Let us know when you need help.

When using h1 - h6 tags, I use this code on a web page:

< h1 >Website Design Bury St Edmunds< /h1 > - nb take out spaces after "<" and before ">" - I had to put them in to make the code show.

then I define the format of the h1 tag in my style sheet:

h1 {
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: x-large;
color: #000000;
}

Obviously, in the above example I use the h1 tag to target the keyword phrase "website design bury st edmunds".

On each page, I target my main keyword phrase for that page with an h1 tag (Google gives most weight to this tag)and then use the h2 - h6 tags to target variations on a theme - eg "Welcome to Web Design Bury St Edmunds" or "Web Design for Small Businesses in Bury St Edmunds Area". Personally, I am happy to have all of my subheadings as h2 headings - that way they all look the same. Don't overdo the keywords or you might be penalised for spam - that's why I sometimes include a h2 subheading that doesn't include the keywords or that uses them out of order as per my last example.

Hope this helps.

forum seems to be giving me some hard problems in seeing the attached images. None the less I am sure it's just a temporary thing, probably a small bug.