Other tags inside an H1 tag

[EscaladeSports]

So I have a situation with the website I'm currently redesigning where the H1 titles are supposed to mix colors per the current brand strategy.

The branding crew is adamant that this has to be done so there is no use in saying "just don't do it".

To accomplish this I'm wrapping the words that need to be the other color in a .

Additionally, some pages have a "sub text" as part of the title, floated to the right and in a smaller font but with the same multi color treatment. I'm wondering if the sub text should be in an H2 and positioned to the right or if it would be beneficial to have the text in the H1 as well.

An example of what I'm talking about would be something like this: "Big Shoes for Big Guys - Nike Shoes"

In that, the "Big Shoes" and "Nike" would be one color and the "for Big Guys" and "Shoes" would be another. I can imagine having the "Nike Shoes" as part of the H1 would be a good idea in some respect but I'm not certain of that.

In order to make that happen I can only think of one way to do it:

-H1-
Big Shoes
-span- for Big Guys -/span-
-div- Nike
-span- Shoes -/span-
-/div-
-/H1-

So that brings me back to the original concern, do search engines care about tags inside the H1?

The only other way to accomplish the color changes that I can think of would be to have a fairly large chunk of javascript setup to go through H1's to colorize them using the span tags. That is unless GoogleBot has started to execute javascript while crawling the sites now...

[Johnny4B]

To answer your question, a span tag within a H1 tag will not have any negative effect, its quite normal to use markup to add visualize appearance, and a span tag is not  "semantic" markup.

Once you are not splitting up the word, as is using

Nike

, I have read that the robots would read that as N "space" ike ... hence not the word nike

BTW, thats a very crude and unsemanctic way to style that phrase, why the div within the H1 tag

I would use a below, without having the benefit of seeing your website layout of course

Big Shoes for Big Guys

Nike Shoes

Then add your markup and styling within the the classes

If you need anymore help with the styling, give me a shout

Regards

John

[TakeshiYoung]

It's fine to include tags withing an

, but including awithin an

goes against HTML conventions.

[jonmifsud]

I tend to use this quite a lot; It does not harm Search Engines, what is important is that only inline elements are contained within an H1 tag, that is span is a perfectly valid element, however a div is not. In your case you should use multiple spans with separate class names.

You should also consider splitting it into H1 / H2 depending on your site structure and navigation as it might make more sense in some cases.