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Increase your blog traffic by tweaking your title tags

Friday, 3rd July , 2009

This is one of those super easy SEO tips that doesn’t require a lot of time and can easily increase your organic search rankings for specific search phrases. Geared primarily at blog posts, this can be applied to general pages on your website, although I’m assuming your main pages are already optimized for search .

The setup
Often, you’ll write an article, get a little exposure (maybe even some RT love on twitter) and then forget about the article and move on to the next topic. But search engines don’t forget and people will start to discover your website through the normal course of search. Sometimes, through good planning (or shear luck) you’ll find you have a real winner on your hands – a blog post that is reaching a lot of new visitors through organic search. While this in itself is great news, you may be able to increase the amount of visitors by making a small change to your title tags.

Determine if you have a winner
To determine if you have a winning post, log into your web analytics software and navigate to traffic sources – organic traffic – keywords. Depending on what tool you have these instructions will differ but ultimately you want to see what keywords drove people to your website. A winning blog post will generate a lot of organic traffic through small variations of 1-3 search phrases.  If you locate a winner, congratulations, the search engines have deemed your post relevant and you can move on to the next step.

If you have a winning post
Locate the first and second search phrases (as measured by visitors) that are sending traffic to your post. You’ll probably have many more unique variations of the keywords (long tail) each sending over a small number of visitors. While the long tail is great, for the purpose of this exercise we are concerned with the higher volume search phrases. Enter these search phrases into Google (or Bing) and determine where you rank organically. You may be surprised to see the blog post already ranking somewhere on the first page. If you’re not listed in the top organic spot, there’s always room for improvement and it’s time to tweak your title tags.

Optimizing Title Tags
Great title tags aren’t going to deliver a top organic ranking by themselves (that’s what links are for) but a properly formatted, keyword rich title tag can generate appreciable differences in your positioning. If you’d like a good run down of best practices for title tags, I recommend you check out SEOmoz’s article on the subject. It’s a little old but it still has really good ideas.

If your title tags for blog posts are formatted like most blogs they probably have the structure of “Post Title | Blog Name”. And while your post title probably includes some of the keywords that are driving traffic, it’s most likely not the best it could be. This is where the easy tweak comes in. It’s time to rewrite the title tag for this blog post with one or two of the search phrases you found in the step above. Your new title tag will look something like “search phrase 1, search phrase 2 | Blog Name”, with the most valuable search phrase appearing at the front of the title tag (far left).

That’s it, make the change and update your blog post. After a week or so check your organic rankings again, hopefully you’ll be surprised to see such a small tweak has helped you gain a few positions.