and just because your heading doesn't read exactly as your title does, that doesn't mean you can't relay the same message, i.e., to relieve any possible "off-putting experience".

Thank you for correcting all the false information.

People spit things out like facts, it is nice to have someone willing to stand up and say "wait a minute guys".

For a landing page that is more concerned about direct conversions then it is a balance of whether repeating the Title in the H1 increases conversions enough to make up for the loss conversions from the more tail terms.

Although it turned into a tougher game when the more specific tail terms convert extremely well.

Ha... well said Aaron....

More variations equal more traffic...

Heres the quote from the "professional seo cop"

"no particular benefit to having unique titles vs. H1s"

What a joke... no benefit in having unique titles and h1's.. doesn't he know that more variations and unique words will equal more possible variations of keywords that you'll rank for.... and it will help you avoid being "over optimized" and spammy looking...

guess he doesn't know that...

I've been in search for atleast 4-5 years, fulltime for little over a year and some of the shit I read that these "seo experts/wannabe rockstars" blog about still amazes me how little they truly do know... and how way advanced I may truly be ;)

Now comes the reason why I even visit this persons website once a month....it may be the other authors or just boredom cuz im getting my shit done the smart way ;)..

PS The tail is always bigger than the head....

Starting out in anything we start out seeking to learn the basics, and a lot of the basics in SEO (for those who like holding a book in their hands, writing in the margins and highlighting the pages) come from books as well as web sites. I'm a firm believer in starting with the basics, and returning there often.

Precisely matching up the document name, the page title and the page heading is an extremely aggressive SEO strategy that can backfire, especially since in highly competitive niches the chance of manual scrutiny by Google is more likely.

Variably mixing keyword phrasing and matching related keyword synonyms on a page (and on other topically related pages of the site) creates modules of related content that reinforce and amplify each other. I'm always amazed at how much can be achieved with the proper amount of time and resources invested in SEO.

Thanks for another great post going back to the basics.

How can there be misinformation when nobody truly knows search engine algos. You can say meta keywords no longer work, but can you be 100% sure? Is that a reason not to use them?

@JamesDNash - "the professional seo cop's" information is based on correlations with the data they receive from crawling the web. Their data shows no correlation between keywords in the H1 and rankings.

I suppose it all comes down to testing. If someone finds a trick that really works, they aint gonna share it anyway!

since moz is crawling the web and their data doesn't come up with any correlations between h1's and rankings.. well, all that tells me is that alot of people don't use h1's properly because they take the cops advice..

I don't think tons of weight are placed onto heading tags. But I do think that they make it far easier to tip over the line toward getting filtered if they are too well aligned with the page title and the backlink anchor text.

Here's a thought. I've worked on countless sites that don't even have any headings (H1, H2, etc) and yet still manage to rank No. 1 for both extremely competitive terms and long-tail variations.

Variation is always good (particularly in page copy and alt. image attributes) simply because it allows a page to capture a wider swath of search terms.

But the bottom line is that even if a page fails to incorporate headings, you're still in good shape as long as your copy (and/or images) have a nice mix of phrases.

P.S. I've talked to the heads of major, world-renowned agencies who have tried to explain to me how aggressive on-page duplication and keyword-density are the keys to the SEO castle. So rest assured that Rand is not alone (and isn't even the biggest culprit).

Thesis has alternate title capabilities built in (no plugins required) and the cleanest SEO markup on the planet.

Okay, that's the end of this spam comment on SEO Book (first in a series ;-)

I agree that most big keywords are followed by a long tail with more traffic and higher conversions, but this isn't always the case. Just offering some edge case nuance that would detract from the main article.

I've analyzed some top positions for some big keywords and found the 1 - 3 primary terms outweigh the tail. Keywords with no geographic patterns, well understood meaning, and few variations in phrasing.

Yup...sometimes the longtail stuff (when it gets REALLY deep longtail) is harder to match up against relevant advertising. And sometimes the head keyword is most of the volume. But of all of our sites we run (dozens) there are only 2 sites where the core keyword accounts for anywhere near half or more of the traffic...whereas on most our sites the lead keyword sends in less than 5% of the search traffic.

Wow Aaron! I'm impressed that's a great post. I really feel like I now understand how SEOs are competing for highly competitive (common) keywords. Your example of what you are doing VS that other guy is great. And you opened my eyes to some of the on-page duplication that I see happening on a lot of websites.

I have given away tips worth millions of dollars for free on this blog. And many additional tips I have shared in our community forums.

- Very true, thank you for all you have given! :)

Glad you value the advice and realize the difference between wisdom vs basic (but often incorrect) advice.