An important aspect of onsite SEO optimization for local keyword searches is by way of the H1 tags.  H1 tags, or Header 1 tags, are simply HTML tags which specify the most prominent text on your website.  These are typically used to identify the title of your website or pages.

Why are H1 tags so important?  H1 tags tell search engines more about your site and its content.  When the search engines crawl the web, one of the important pieces of content they are looking for are the H1 tags.  They use this information to match up your website with keywords people are searching for.  This is why it’s also important to use many different keywords in your H1 tags.  The more variations of keywords and long-tail keywords (phrases people search for) the better.

Be careful not to over do it though, this is called keyword stuffing.  This may actually make it less sensible to someone reading your site and the search engines can even pick up on this and penalize you in ranking for certain keywords. In addition, be mindful not to use too many H1 tags on your website as the search engines may penalize you for this as well.  Think of it as a newspaper, the most prominent pieces of info and the newspaper’s title and the front page feature story.  You should aim to have NO MORE than two H1 tags per page – one for your website title and one for your page or post title.