My point was that if it makes sense to use the logo as the heading or you have no good alternative for a H1, then you should feel free to use the logo as the heading (it has an alt attribute, and Google can infer the meaning from the alt attribute’s value).

What I have in mind is the structure of the individual web page. Also, I’d argue that you should not look at the site as a whole, but at each individual page in its own. A visitor is not likely to browse through the entire site, but might just land on a single page.

Also, you may find it interesting that the H1 on this page is not the link in the top right corner (which could be considered a logo, I guess), but the title of the blog entry. In this case, that was the natural thing as this page has a natural heading, but that might not be the case on every page — such as a corporate home page for instance.

What I’m trying to say is basically that you shouldn’t use H2 without a preceding H1.

If you have the same h1 tag on every page then you’re giving every document on your site the same heading. What would you do if you converted your content to printed documents? Every article deserves a unique heading doesn’t it? Unique titles don’t make it okay to have the same heading everywhere; the title describes page content, just as h1 does, but it’s not presentational.

A site’s name (or logo) is information about the site, not about the page you’re looking at, yet the h1 tag is meta information for the page, not the site. On the home page it would be reasonable to have an h1 that contained the site’s name, but there’s no need to do it there either.

By putting an image in your h1 you’re missing out on a potentially strong indicator (to the search engines) of your page’s content. There are techniques for putting copy in the h1 tag, moving the text off page with CSS and replacing the text with a background image. I don’t think it’s a good strategy for the h1, so I’ll not repeat the code here (though I’m sure Google would turn up several examples).

Wordtracker advise setting both title and heading to relevant keyword rich text, though they don’t necessarily need to match (you can target different keywords by using different copy in each tag). See http://www.wordtracker.com/academy for a bunch of stuff on this topic.

I checked SEOmoz – they now have no h1 tags on their home page as the logo is in a div. Most other pages on SEOmoz (I only checked a handful) appear to have an h1 tag that matches the content of the page. seobook.com also seems to be light on h1 tags at the moment. It seems that nobody is perfect!