I want to start by saying anything I do to my website, that can be physically seen is done so for the site visitors. I would never put search engine rankings or search engine manipulation above what a site visitor would see.

After all, it doesn’t matter how many visitors we can get to our websites, if the website want convert them it want matter.
With that being said I would also like to say that the search engines are changing daily, therefore just because something works today doesn’t mean that it will work tomorrow.

I do use header tags on my websites, but it has nothing to do with the search engines. I use them so I can control the size and look of the text in different parts of my sites.

I have tested the use of header tags and have not seen them affect the ranking of a website in the last year or more. I know that many SEO’s still preach the use of header tags, but something’s never change in their minds.