Optimizing for Two Keywords - H Tag Best Practices?

[Charles_Murdock]

Hey Everyone,

I have to do a local SEO campaign. My landing pages need to target two keywords. I was wondering if you could look over this proposed H tags I've written and give me your thoughts.

Houses for Sale and Commercial Real Estate in Houston, TX

Houses for Sale in Houston, TX

Commercial Real Estate in Houston, TX

Am I heading in the right or wrong direction?

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Charles. You might consider putting these on two separate pages entirely. From a user perspective, typically someone looking for homes is not looking for commercial real estate as well, and vice versa.

[Charles_Murdock]

I agree with you, but I'm a bit limited by a few things that are out of my hands.

Let's say from a purely hypothetical standpoint that I was doing something for local SEO where both keywords applied, would this be a good idea?

[RyanPurkey]

Hmm. That's tough, per http://moz.com/learn/seo/on-page-factors you want to be, "hyper-relevant to a specific topic (usually a product or single object)" so having these different sections would be a little odd. Maybe you should centralize around "Houston Real Estate" as the H1 and Homes / Commercial as H2s.

[Charles_Murdock]

So an appropriate way to do this in the abstract would be

h1 tag reads "houses for sale in houston tx"

h2 tag reads "big houses for sale in houston tx"

h2 tag reads "small houses for sale in houston tx"

[RyanPurkey]

Honestly, that's too keyword stuffed / repetitive for my tastes. Google's a lot better at figuring out the context and correlation of a page without having to find all the different ways to repeat a very specific phrase like, "houses for sale in houston tx"  As a quick example, run a search for the same and you'll find Google bolding "real estate" "homes" etc as if they were your search terms.

That's why the ideal is to have a topically powerful page--it can be really specific, like 'wheel chair accessible homes in for sale in houston'--but should focus on that main topic, not those exact words.  Cheers!

[Charles_Murdock]

So do you think that the value of using H2 tags has really gone the way of the do-do then?

When should I use them?

Thanks so much for your help. I appreciate it.

[RyanPurkey]

H2s are valuable, but in the context of organizing information on a page. Let's stick with the "Wheelchair Accessible Houses for sale in Houston" example. That phrase could be the H1.  A great H2 would be, "Single Level Homes" Another, "Houses with Wheelchair Elevators" "Homes with Power Stair Lifts" and so on. Even though the main theme / keyword is the H1 example, all of those H2s are going to contribute to it and help the user navigate to the types of homes they're most interested in. you could also link to those sections of the page with on-page anchor links (#) to make navigation simpler (or dynamically rendered). So what I'm saying is they don't need to have the exact phrase you're targeting in each one as you used in your example above.