Best practice for heading structures on Ecommerce homepages

[PIXUS]

I have been doing some research into the heading structures of some of the top selling online stores in the UK. One thing that has come to my attention is that many of them do not have H1 elements on their homepage. I am presuming that because they are targeting their own brand on the homepage that they feel no need to have a H1??

Examples are:

http://www.boohoo.com/

http://chainreactioncycles.com/

http://www.jdsports.co.uk/home

Some of them even use the logo as a H1 such as http://www.missguided.co.uk/

Does anyone think that using the logo as a H1 would have any negative effect from a search engine perspective?

Look forward to hearing your thoughts!

[EGOL]

We have a rule at our office......  "Do not assume that your competitor knows what he is doing."

Why?   Bet on yourself.  Bet on yourself.

Your competitor probably doesn't know what he is doing... and you probably can't figure out what he is trying to do.

Map your own course.  Make your own decisions.  Don't let competitors who are probably noobs jerk your plan around.

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Does anyone think that using the logo as a H1 would have any negative effect from a search engine perspective?

I think that it is a waste.  If you are not ranking for your own brand you have big problems.  Use the H1 for what you are attacking.

[EricEnge]

EGOL has it right.  Should not need any targeted SEO to rank for your brand on the home page. But, for that reason, you should work on getting your home page to rank for non-branded terms in addition.  I would include those in the title tag and an H1 tag on the page (I don't think it matters any more if it is H1, or H2, or H3, by the way, but some heading tag).

Put the major non-banded keyword to the far left of the title tag and the heading. Brand name at the end.

Also, the heading tag and the title tag do not need to be identical, so you can use different variants of the non-branded keyword in the title tag and heading.