In reply to Humayun Hashmi.

Thanks Humayun. Are you sure search engines are reading them? As far as I can tell they aren't. I doubt they would ever be much of a ranking factor.

Search engines are interested in content. If we add more semantics to our code, search engines could use the semantics, but I wouldn't expect it to be that important to ranking. I think the search engines would sooner present a page with great content and poor html than the other way around.

You never know, though. Maybe they will put more importance on the html structure of web pages, or maybe it'll be something like the semantics can give a small boost to a page or site.

By the way I know what you mean about the masthead and the header. I think the masthead is technically just the title of a magazine or newspaper. For a website, I suppose a logo is really the closed thing to a masthead. Somehow it's become the entire header though.