Headers: does my home page need them for SEO?

[lawboy]

This h1, h2 stuff is a bit confusing. I was told that the "1" and "2" are just font size. Ok, fine. But why the big deal about headers with regard to seo?

I was told that we actually use CSS. Does that matter for spiders?

[tedster]

The 1 and 2, etc, are definitely NOT about font size. They split the H tags into their relative importance: heading, sub-heading, sub-sub-heading, etc.

Because headings are intended as a "quick summary" for that section of a document, search engines traditionally have looked a bit more closely at the text they contain as being a relevance indicator. But more recently because of abuse, particularly of the H1 tag, search engines cannot depend on H1 text to be a good indicator of relevance the way it used to.

However, if your page uses a properly nested set of H tags for true headings and sub-headings:

H1
----H2
-------H3
----H2
-------H3
----------H4
----H2

...then you are exposing your content structure to the search engine, and that does help your content become more "transparent" to their algorithm.

CSS makes no difference to the spider -- CSS is about how a page is rendered visually, and not at all about the meaning of the content.