Search terms that have the same meaning
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If there are two fairly equally strong search terms that mean the same thing and want to direct people to a single page on my site, is it recommended that both phrases be placed in the H1? For example,
Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato Sandwich (BLT Sandwich)
I don't want to rank high for only one phrase while ranking lower (and potentially losing users) for the second phrase. What's the best strategy for this?
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I wouldn't do anything that could look spammy, and I'd say that might. The traditional way to use an acronym is to place it in brackets directly after the first mention of the written out term i.e. "Yesterday I bought a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich (BLT)" and then use the acronym for the rest of the article. Write for your audience though - do they know what a BLT is? If so I might use
BLT
in the title. Have you done any keyword research to see which would work best?
Saying all that, Google is getting better at recognising synonyms. If I type BLT into Google, I get results for Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomato too - Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomato is bolded in the search results, so Google know they're often the same thing.
Edit - I've just had a thought - using an acronym might not be the best example of different phrases. Check this out: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/what-is-latent-semantic-indexing-seo-defined/21642/ and http://moz.com/community/q/latent-semantic-indexing-does-this-help-rankings-relevance
You used to be able to search for synonyms in Google using the tilde ~ but they dropped the feature earlier this year.
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How similar are they? Are you finding that you have competition that rank for one but not the other? If they are very similar I wouldn't be surprised if ranking well for one had you already ranking well for the other.
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