I think that the usage of the h1 tag on a webpage strongly depends on site content and site structure so one can not generally define a usage maximum for a single page.

For instance on a blog that lists a certain amount of recent articles on the main page, it does make sense to give each article title a h1 and use h2 for sub-topics in the same article. According to this pattern, a typical blog would have 5 or more h1 tags on the front page - and that's no problem with Google at all.

I would recommend to use as many h1 tags on a webpage as there are principal topics of equivalent importance.

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My SEO Blog and its latest article: Google Bowling: Reverse SEO

H1 definiatly makes a difference in SERPS with some of my sites

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Webmaster: Website Acquire
Hard 4

no, one h1 tag per page max.

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Catholic Faith | Joshua Francis

H1 tags have very little to do with actual ranking and it has been the case for the past few years. Search engines change so do not get stuck in your old ways and see for your self before flaming me.

H1 tag is not a SEO issue it is semantic one and you may use more than one. Personally I prefer to use only one <h1> so that Screen Reader users can jump to the “the most important” part of the page however there is ambiguity between headings having to be semantic (a document must start with a H1 and related sections broken down into H2 etc…) and ambiguity where headings indicating level of importance and thus the start of the content. The ambiguity lies in the w3c specification so you would be ok to choose either for now but I prefer importance.

I too would do this and have a W3C quote to back us up on it.