2008/08/12

Onpage SEO: Title Tags Change Search Engine Rankings

Recently I decided to blog more about SEO related topics. Mainly because I have a couple keywords I want to start targeting. I noticed one of my blogs (My San Diego SEO Blog) (<— not this SEO Blog) was getting traffic for terms relating to ‘SEO‘ and ‘San Diego‘. I’m pretty sure the love I’m getting from the engines come from my relevant link right here in my blog side bar because I never really had any San Diego content.

The title of the blog used to be

“SEO Competition – Blog 2.0 vs. The Website“

But now that I’m targeting the term San Diego SEO, I changed it to

“San Diego SEO, Blog SEO & Web 2.0 SEO“

Basically I gave the term I’m targeting prominence, plus I gave the keyword ‘SEO‘ more density. This blog is one of my fun blogs. I’m not really targeting any other terms. Normally, I wouldn’t recommend adding a keyword 3 times to the title tag (like I did with ‘SEO’). But like I said, it’s my fun blog.

I was getting traffic from Yahoo! & MSN, but NOT GOOGLE. As you can see in this snapshot I took (with the time & date) that my rankings for the term ‘san diego seo’ was horrible.

Before I made that title tag change on Thursday, August 7th 2008 Blog Optimizer was ranked #498 for the term ‘san diego seo‘

*Disclaimer – That Thursday night I wrote the post; Web 2.0 Tags + SEO = Search Engine Love

Now look at the change in ranking the next day.

The next day (Friday, August 8th 2008) BlogOptimizer was ranked #63 for the term ‘san diego seo‘

*Disclaimer #2 – Since that site is a blog, it has the ability to jump 400 spots AND fall 400 spots overnight (literally). If you search for San Diego SEO now, I’m willing to bet that BlogOptimizer is not #63 anymore. Blogs are very fluid in the SERP’s unless that blog has strong link strength.

In case you didn’t know how important titles were to websites, search a term in Google and see that 9 out of the top 10 sites have that targeted term in their the listing titles.

I would like to thank you for taking the time to read my SEO blog. I really do appreciate it. You can read another related post (found below) or subscribe here. Once again, thank you for visiting James’ SEO blog.

2008/01/12

SEO Video – Keyword Placement

ON PAGE SEO VIDEOS

A few places to place your keywords on a webpage…

Then I remembered more places…

“The search engines look at many factors. They look for the words throughout the page, both in tye visible page and in the HTML source code for the page. Each time they find the word, they are weighted in some way. A word in one position is “worth” more than a word in another position. A word formatted in one way is “worth” more than a word formatted in another”….

“You’re putting keywords into your web pages in such a manner that the search engines can get to them, read them, and regard them as significant.”

“If a search engine finds the relevant keywords on your page, that’s good. If it finds the keywords in the right places on the page, theat’s a really powerful thing that differentiates your page from your competitors’.”

Peter Kent: Author of Search Engine Optimization for Dummies

I can quote Pete all day, but that wouldn’t be fair to his book. If you haven’t read it yet, it’s never too late!

background image could be named a keyword too.