A question popped up today if it is OK to use more than one H1 tag in a XHTML document. With the understanding that H1 is the most important and working your way to H6 becomes less important. This question was directed towards the case when you want to have an Logo (with image replacement and hidden text) on the same page as a Page Title. I don’t want to make the Logo block less important than the Page Title, nor the other way around. Is the best way to solve this have two H1 tags? or does the Page Title be come H2?

I found this writing while surfing the web:

In most cases, a Web page will have one primary topic. This topic will be represented in the HTML title and so you should use the H1 tag to identify the page in a similar way as the title. The H1 heading should be the top-level heading on your page, and there should only be one on every page. Search engines place a lot of value on the text inside H1 tags, so make sure that it’s optimized and well-represents the page contents.

There are no rules about how many H1, H2, etc. tags you can have on a page. While it’s standard to have only one H1 top-level header, if your page has a lot of different sections, it might make sense to divide it with several H1 tags. However, for search engine optimization, it’s better to create separate pages for content that you want to call out with separate H1 headings.

Upon further research, I found that the W3C does use multiple instances of the H1 tag, but never more that 2 times. I suppose that there is no final answer on multiple H1 tags other than it is best practice to always only use one H1 tag.