So I have a situation with the website I'm currently redesigning where the H1 titles are supposed to mix colors per the current brand strategy.

The branding crew is adamant that this has to be done so there is no use in saying "just don't do it".

To accomplish this I'm wrapping the words that need to be the other color in a .

Additionally, some pages have a "sub text" as part of the title, floated to the right and in a smaller font but with the same multi color treatment. I'm wondering if the sub text should be in an H2 and positioned to the right or if it would be beneficial to have the text in the H1 as well.

An example of what I'm talking about would be something like this: "Big Shoes for Big Guys - Nike Shoes"

In that, the "Big Shoes" and "Nike" would be one color and the "for Big Guys" and "Shoes" would be another. I can imagine having the "Nike Shoes" as part of the H1 would be a good idea in some respect but I'm not certain of that.

In order to make that happen I can only think of one way to do it:

-H1-
Big Shoes
-span- for Big Guys -/span-
-div- Nike
-span- Shoes -/span-
-/div-
-/H1-

So that brings me back to the original concern, do search engines care about tags inside the H1?

The only other way to accomplish the color changes that I can think of would be to have a fairly large chunk of javascript setup to go through H1's to colorize them using the span tags. That is unless GoogleBot has started to execute javascript while crawling the sites now...