Is having a word with the H1 tag the same as having a 24 pt bold word in terms of SEO?

[Ryan S]

As above really.

I want to have an H1 heading for a webpage but for some reason the H1 setting doesn't seem to be working and applying to my title. However if I bold the word and put a 24pt size on the word this visially has the same effect as the H1 tag,

Will search engines see this the same way? Will they notice the difference between me using an H1 tag to manually altering it all? Does it have the same SEO?
Hi Smelly Cat, thanks for the quick response! I'm getting my web designer to look into it now so hopefully it'll be sorted very soon indeed. I'm new to starting out about optimisation and just as I suspected it wouldn't look the same to the search engines.

Would it be okay to H1 tag the title and then alter the size anyway so that it has a number of different attribues (for example an H1 tag, a bold tag and also a 24pt tag). I've checked the HTML and it still tags it as H1 actually.

[Smelly Cat]

Search engines will not see it the same way.

It doesn't have to do with the size. Search engines don't care how big a font is. All of my h tags are the same size to look uniform to the user. They read the tag itself. So if you don't have an h1 tag, the search engines will see you don't have an heading.

You should really try to make it work. Have you tried an h2 or h3 tag?

edit:

@JR: you might want to listen to what Google's Matt Cutts says about the h1 tag and abusing it. It's algorithm does take it into account.

@Ryan - Read the Google starter guide and see what they say about headings. In general I follow the google guidelines and do well in all 3 search engines.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.c...guide.html

Second paragraph, the link is there.

[just "JR"]

SEs do NOT "see" <h> tags: they don't care!
They don't care about the size either!
(But they WILL care of "contrast": if you try white text on white background (invisible text), your site will probably be banned!)

They see your META tags (title, keywords etc), and the texts on the page.
Go to http://www.submitexpress.com and take their meta tag analyser (free): it will give you a very good report as how your site will be seen by SEs.

[Jerry]

H tags are relevant just like Meta tags are relevant the Search engine picks up both.

You normally use H tags on the basis of targetting keyword phrases you want to rank for on the search engines using your H tags.

The main thing is to not be spammy and have keyword lucrative content.