I am unfamiliar with how to strategize around using H1 & H2 tags. I have 1-3 keywords in the meta title and description. Do I use the same keywords as H1 and H2 tags? How should someone use these tags?
Use them to set the expectation levels of your visitors i.e. make sure they relate to the content. They won't really make an impact as far as SEO goes.
doodnothin, as far as on page optimization is concerned, META tags have little value. Your concern should be the title tag and page body. Insert the phrase(s) once in each. Beyond this, you should concern yourself more with targeting the proper keyphrases and getting backlinks for them. This means: 1. find 2 or 3 word phrases (using your favorite tool) that you can compete for. Check the number of searches. See which sites compete with them. Check their size, backlinks. Can you beat any of the first 10? and 2. Get as many backlinks for same or similar terms as you can. The more popular a page linking back to you, the more it's worth in the SERPS (generally speaking). That's all you need to start out. A few basic on-site tips, and some backlinks. Write articles, forum posts, blog comments for them. You don't need hours, days, or months of SEO learning to get results. The more value you put into your writing, the more results you'll have. Don't worry about giving everything away, that happened a long time ago for almost every possible subject matter.
I think the only important tag out of all meta tags is the meta description which is obviously helpful from a SEO point of view. Having a good, brief and descriptive description for your website can help you attract more visitors to your website. The description of course, is displayed on your SERP. As for the h1, it is still useful especially if your using it with sense + your keywords! and you can have multiple h1 on your website (well at least if you really need to have more than one h1 logically then it would be alright) however avoid overdoing it!
I think what matters more is how many other links there are on the page. A lot or a little? Also, what kind.
h1 is a heading for your page. If you are using a image heading or using text like 'welcome' as heading, this is where you can use the power of h1. I will recommend using h2 only if you have divided your page in sections. Use h2 as section heading as it is supposed to be used.
H1 and H2 used for headings and sub headings and the keyword placed in H1 or H2 have higher value than simple text. Other than the H1 and H2 tag which can only be used for heading, the <header> tag (introduced in HTML5) also have the priority as much as H1 have. But the advantage of header is that you can write complete paragraph in the header tag.
The strategy of using heading tags is simple: 1. Use H1 tag "once" in every page (not more than once) 2. Make headings according to the content of your web page(s) 3. Don't add unwanted and irrelevant headings only to place keywords in it. Visitors can get irritated by that. Your question? I have 1-3 keywords in the meta title and description. Do I use the same keywords as H1 and H2 tags? Answer: Read strategy No. 2 Hope this helps.
You can actually use more than one h1 on your webpage ONLY if it is logically reasonable that you really need to have more than one instance of h1. Just watched a video of Matt Cutts' discussing if it's alright to use h1 more than once. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIn5qJKU8VM
U should use H1 , H2......H5 only one time in web page. Main keyword uses as Title by H1 Tag and other uses H2...H3 tag