Off-topic Reading

February 20, 2008 by Collin LaHay
Filed under: General 

If you are wondering why there has been a larger-than-usual time lapse in my post, it is because I was doing a case study on my last post about simple blogging seo tweaks and how to maximize your search engine rankings with simple changes in your blogging config.

I received an email arguing that removing your blog keyword(s) from your title improves relevancy. Now instead of arguing point vs point, I thought I would give it a simple test. Please know that this is only a FOUR DAY case study on my blog, and results may vary.

Comments

10 Comments on Off-topic Reading

  1. CashJuke on Thu, 21st Feb 2008 1:16 am

    2. I didn’t think it would take very long at all for Yahoo to catch on to “spam”. I’m surprised it was ever dofollow at all.

  2. Binh Nguyen on Thu, 21st Feb 2008 6:19 am

    3. I agree with removing the site name out of every title. That will remove duplicated keyword. I will follow your idea.

  3. Collin - De Ruyck on Thu, 21st Feb 2008 7:36 am

    4. There are lots of studies you can do to prove someone wrong as I think there are tons of ways to do things.

  4. Rakesh on Thu, 21st Feb 2008 9:00 am

    5. I couldn’t understand much of the part of this post as I am a Noob. but i will take it as a stepping stone towards SEO.

    Can you name me few resources which can teach me SEO???

    Thanks

  5. Steffan on Thu, 21st Feb 2008 11:32 am

    6. Using your blog as a test case and documenting the results was really useful. Thanks again for another valuable post that’ll change my blogging strategy. You’d think that keeping your title there would GIVE you relevancy because keyword density is so important, but apparently not. Huh.

    Thanks for this tip. Another gem from Mixed Market Arts.

  6. Breakaway on Fri, 22nd Feb 2008 11:13 am

    7. I used a program that analyzes the pages in the top 10 for a keyword and analyzes my page, and that was one of the tips they had was to not have it in every post title. That helped me to not over-saturate my page with the keywords.

    Write relevant posts about your keyword, and you can naturally slip your keyword into a post, and that will help to improve your relevancy in the search engines.

  7. Kyle James on Fri, 22nd Feb 2008 12:58 pm

    8. I’m a little confused about what you tested here? Your titles with keywords turned off or on? It is a little vague.

    My argument no matter what your testing, would be that your sample size is very small and isn’t credible.

    Over time your blog is naturally going to grow as traffic, inbound links, bot crawls, RSS subscriptions, etc. continue to increase YOU SHOULD EXPECT a slight increase like this. Besides I wouldn’t consider 3% a significant increase to warrant saying your study was a success either.

    You could probably take a picture of someone taking a shit and post it on your site and see your traffic increase over the short term. Ok I take that example back, that would significantly increase your traffic, because with the way the internet is it would probably go viral! :)

    Can you tell I’m taking a statistics class right now?

  8. Collin LaHay on Fri, 22nd Feb 2008 1:14 pm

    9. The test was for the html title’s of my blog post. “Off-topic Reading | Make Money Blogging” or just “Off-topic Reading” like it is now.

    My SE traffic has been 2-10% for the last three months. It was 13-16% on the four days where I did not even post. With the way Google updates indexed pages, it will hopefully be an additional 3% when all of my pages that Google indexed are with the new titles.

    Like I said, its not exact but in my personal experience it went up. Feel free to try the opposite if you disagree.

  9. Kyle James on Fri, 22nd Feb 2008 1:23 pm

    10. Ah I got you now. Yeah I pulled off the “| %blogname%” a while back. I think you should definitely write a follow-up post in a month from now, cause you should have a lot larger sample size at that point. I don’t have any data proven it’s better either, but I hate seeing that junk when I look at search results or on Social Bookmarking sites… Maybe it’s good branding strategy, but from that respect nobody cares.

    Thanks for the additional explanation.

  10. paulette on Sun, 24th Feb 2008 7:59 pm

    11. In my opinion the one argued with you is right. Maybe the logic of it is putting on keywords limit the search to your keywords only.

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