What's with heading font sizes in the default TwentyTen theme?

WordPress theme conventions uses H1 for the main blog name heading, H2 for post names, H3 for sections inside a post, H4 for subsections of those, and so on.

So yes, the H2 may be bigger than the H1 in terms of display size, but the H-number is used to show search engines relative importance. The name of the site is the most important thing, followed by the name of the post, and so on.

So inside your post content, start with H3, not H2.

Yes, I understand that H1 is more significant than H2, which is more significant than H3, etc etc. That’s why I’m suggesting it should look more significant; i.e. be in a bigger font size.

It doesn’t make sense to have post content start with H3; for optimal SEO the post title should be H1, the first logical heading level is H2, the second is H3 etc etc. Perhaps this is breaking conventions, but I don’t want my site to be at the top level; it’s the content I want search engines to focus on, not the site itself.

imho, the header font sizes are graded from large to small within the content area; if you don’t like the size, you are able to change them in style.css; for instance:

#content h1 { font-size: 20px; }

the rather large space after paragraphs is defined here:

#content p,
#content ul,
#content ol,
#content dd,
#content pre,
#content hr {
	margin-bottom: 24px;
}

Thanks for the tips! Here’s what I came up with for my child theme:

/* Heading Sizes Should Scale by Significance */
#content h1 { font-size: 20px; }
#content h2 { font-size: 18px; }
#content h3 { font-size: 16px; }
#content h4 { font-size: 14px; }
#content h5 { font-size: 12px; }

/* Headings Should Be Bold, and have less space after them */
#content h1,
#content h2,
#content h3,
#content h4,
#content h5,
#content h6 {
	font-weight: bold;
	line-height: 1.5em;
	margin: 2px 0 2px 0;
}

/* We don't need such a huge gap after everything */
#content p,
#content ul,
#content ol,
#content dd,
#content pre,
#content hr {
	margin-bottom: 12px;
}