Get 2 Times As Many Search Hits With Good Post Titles
Day 22 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide
You have your website going, and you are starting to get traffic. Maybe some of the traffic is coming from direct referrals, maybe some of it is coming from comments, maybe some people are just typing in your address. But how much of it is coming from Search Engines?
Not Enough
How do I know that You aren’t getting enough traffic from search engines? Simple. No one is. You would be hard pressed to name a single website that wouldn’t benefit from more search engine traffic. Search engine traffic is the cream of the crop. It is the most valuable traffic by far. On average, your search engine reader is worth more than your direct referral, he is worth tons more than a social network user.
Mature sites get about 80% of their traffic from search engines. Even this site, which is only 6 weeks old, gets about 40% of its daily traffic from search engines. (Except for days I get stumbled, then StumbleUpon accounts for 90% of the traffic. So how bout a stumble?) The bottom line is you need to build up your search engine rankings.
Luckily, there is one easy step to improving your search engine rankings that many bloggers don’t think about. Simply doing this one step can greatly increase your rankings for your targeted keywords.
Use Smart Post Titles
Your post tiles are incredibly important. They affect everything about how you rank in the search engines. Google looks at your <H1><H2><H3>and<H4> tags for keywords to see what your site is about. Your post title will display as your search engine result unless you are using something like All in one SEO Pack (which you should) and you change it.
Most importantly, people link to you using your post titles - At least half the backlinks you get to a post will be some variation of your title. So your post titles have a huge affect on your anchor text, and consequently the keywords that you rank well for.
So What Are Smart Post Titles
Smart post titles attract Google, attract Backlinks, and attract Searchers in the results page. This may seem hard, but all three are looking for similar things
- Be Specific - Your readers should usually be able to tell what your post is about from your post title. If they can’t figure it out, why will they come to your site? And how will Google tell?
- Keyword Density - Use at least 1 or 2 keywords that you want to rank for in your title. That will tend to set the theme for your page as well
- Numerals - Using Numbers in your title attracts backlinks, attracts Diggs, and attracts searches. Do it whenever you can
Give those a try and see if you don’t start seeing an improvement in your search engine rankings.
on June 15th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
I have a question about the second to last sentence of your post. Why does using numerals in a blog post title attract backlinks, Diggs and searches? I can see how informative lists might help with traffic — for example, Top 25 Ways to Increase Site Traffic — but does simply putting numerals in the title, as in I Caught 6 Fish Today, help drive traffic? Thanks.
on June 15th, 2007 at 6:57 pm
I would argue that numerals help no matter what, although it would be interesting to see an actual study to show that. I might have to dig into my analytics backlog and dredge out some data.
Clearly lists are good. And putting numerals in your title may channel your thinking along those lines. But going solely on which is better
I caught 6 fish today
or
I caught six fish today
I would still argue that the 6 helps the 6 stand out if someone was quickly scanning a list of text. And since arguably the entire trick to getting traffic to your site is to make it stand out from the crowd, anything that does it is good. That title doesn’t stand out as well as say
6 Fish Caught, A Record Day
but it doesn’t hurt
Of course you’re welcome to disagree. And I would love to see some actual stats on the subject. This was just empiracle knowledge of what I have found attracts people to my posts