[SEO Question] Using header tags for all of my body text? Harmful?

I am putting together a site to do some Social Media Consulting and just have a question about whether or not what I am doing could potential effect my rankings.

I purchased a wordpress theme for my site and I took a look at the coding and I noticed that most of the sites text is made up just header tags. The options in the wordpress theme lets you customize the font and style of the header tags to use them as different font styles in your text.

Example:
H1 = Verdana 16pt
H2 = Calibri 19pt Bold
Etc....

My question is: If the only wording on your website is in header tags will it effect your rankings? and should I just stop being lazy and figure out how to modify the CSS to my liking?

Thanks!

Any help would be beyond greatly appreciated

Yes, it will. The larger header tags (H1 is largest, H6 is smallest) is intended for short blurbs, headings, major titles etc. The smallest heading (h6) is intended for maybe 1 or 2 sentences. You should also only have 1 H1 and H2 per page. Anymore and your site cannot be properly "viewed" by search bots.

Things that should be in header tags: Page titles, Page names, Article titles, Article names, Category names, Category titles, Category description, product name (not in the category listing though!)
Things that should not be in header tags: Page paragraphs, article paragraphs, specs, details, listings etc.

Thank you!

Are there any penalization for large text with just normal styling?
Nothing big just from 12pt to 17pt. 12 just seems way too small. -_-

Use Paragraph tags for long blocks of text. Google cares less about the actual size of the font, it just sees the h1 tag surrounding the words.

yesiamj3ff said:

Are there any penalization for large text with just normal styling?
Nothing big just from 12pt to 17pt. 12 just seems way too small. -_-

Click to expand...

The styling of text doesn't come into any major importance until you start trying to cheat. So make the text as big as you want, but don't make some text obscenely small and try to use it to gain ranks. Google views hiding key text that isn't valuable to the viewer but good for SERPs as blackhat and will flag you. So hiding text (size, padding, color, location etc) is a big no-no and easily caught.

I have to disagree with not having multiple H2 tags. If you have a products page using H1 for the category and H2 for the item titles would tell Google that each item is of equal importance on the page.

Only 1 H1, but as many H2 and so on as you need.

Header tags are not for styling, they are for emphasis. Use a div or a span styled how you want it for your text styling.

Using H tags for styling will slant your on page SEO significantly.

You should not be thinking "I want that font larger so I will use a header tag." but rather, "That information is very important, so i will use a header tag."