Example of relative sizes found in HTML headingsWhen you are formatting your web page, you need to create structure with tags like headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, and divs.
When I teach new web design students, I usually have one nay sayer who says that the order of heading tags does not matter. Not so! Just like when you are creating a hierarchical list, you don’t mess with the expected order of items and how they are nested with each other.
It is important that you use ONE heading 1 tag (h1) in each page and it should be at the top of your content. You can certainly restyle the look of your headings, but I would not advise making your h1 any smaller than any other text. Give a cue to your students about your content title with that heading 1.
Use heading 2 tags to create titles within the page, and use heading 3 tags as subtitles. You use the heading tags to indicate page structure to your readers and to the thousands of spiders crawling your web site (like Google).
Use a paragraph as a normal text container. Once again, it is important to wrap all elements in a web page with structural body tags, like div p, heading tags, blockquote, lists, etc.