Should HTML Heading Tags ALWAYS be in Hierarchical Order?

[Peter264]

The question is in the title: Should HTML Heading Tags ALWAYS be in Hierarchical Order?

For example, using them in order: H1, H2, H3... etc.

Or is it OK to have H2 tags before the main H1 tag on a page? - for example sidebar content with H2 headings before the main content H1 tag?

Your thoughts are greatly appreciated.

[irvingw]

Good answer by Devin,

If you are coding a site from beginning I would put them in order, but if the site already exists and it is a pain to change don't sweat it. If it's a quick global fix in CSS I would take the 30 minutes to do it personally.

But like Devin said the most important thing is that you don't use a bunch of H1s on a page and the H1 should of course contain the main keyword phrase in it.

[Devin_Anderson]

Hi Peter,

Bots/crawlers etc can read your page no matter what order the headers appear in the HTML. The hierarchical order is there for convenience more than anything else.

You should have no problem doing what you suggest in your example. Just try not to have more than one H1 on each page.

Dev