H1 Tags - Why the large font size?

[chrisnrach17]

I've read on a few websites recently that H1 tags are important in your site - in particular it said that search engines do look for H1 tags when crawling.

I was experimenting with H1 tags in Dreamweaver and was surprised at the size of the font used for H1 tags. It was far too big and in my opinion overpowered the site somewhat.

Is it ok to reduce the size of the H1 tag font and get away with it with search engines?

[chrisnrach17]

ok i've managed to play around with the code and get the size down but I can't seem to find any way of making the text non-bold.

any suggestions?

[Costin Trifan]

1. SEs don't give a *** on what font-size you're using in your pages.

2. Every web browser manufacturer (ie. Microsoft, Apple) has its own predefined font styles and sizes to display the html content, so an H1 tag might look larger in IE and smaller in Firefox or bolder in Safari...

3. Use stylesheets to define your personal font-sizes so the elements that have those styles applied will be displayed approx. equal in all browsers.

[htmlbasictutor]

Originally Posted by chrisnrach17

ok i've managed to play around with the code and get the size down but I can't seem to find any way of making the text non-bold.

any suggestions?

Set the font-weight in the stylesheet.
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/fonts.htm...ef-font-weight