Do you know why some entry pages are so successful? How much time do you spend to find a good title for a blog article? Are your headlines and static archive filenames containing your blogs ‘keyword cloud’?
If I check the statistics for my entry pages I see that there are always pages which are more successful than others. Two important points beside the body keyword density and the tagging are the article title and the filename of the archived static page!
Many blog authors tend to be very focused on the body part of their content. But beside the main content it is very important to attract readers and search engines with a brilliant title. Just pushing the ‘Publish …’ button after writing that awesome article means to give away a good chance to optimize your blog article for reader attraction. The same is true for SEO … titles and file names are highly relevant to search engines!
- Readers following many feeds are just skimming the headlines in their feed readers to find relevant articles. If you don’t have an attractive headline they are not going to click!
- Article titles and archive pages containing your main ‘keyword cloud’ means a better listing in search results!
Continuously checking your search results and the adword possibilities with a following concentration or widening of your key density is a very successful and not very time-consuming way to optimize the success of your blog articles and titles.
Last but not least your title and your archive page name and path are showing up everywhere where somebody is linking to your article. This is the easiest way to gain keyword competence and relevant links.
Lovely trap number one: Don’t change the publishing date of your article because most blog systems will then change the path of your archive page.
Lovely trap number two: Blogger creates a new name for your edited archive page if you change the title of your article. (But they also keep the old version … hmmm) So better take the first chance to generate a good page name!
Both traps may result in broken external links! I have just tested it again on Blogger and now have to update the appropriate del.icio.us links manually. If you lose all incoming links and trackbacks to an article because of these little traps … well I would be angry … and nobody to blame except myself.
It’s just another version of “The fish has to like the taste of the worm … not the angler”. As a result you will get more inbound traffic and higher listings in search results.
Technorati Tags: blogging, article, content, title, writing, SEO
10 thoughts on “Managing Titles and Paths For Traffic”
Via popurls.com I found the del.icio.us entry to 11 Best Practices for URLs.
It is really worth reading that list!
Nice examples …
What do you think about the link to a page itself? There is an old and ongoing discussion about long or short links. If I optimize my file path for keywords it naturally becomes a long link which many people don’t like.
What do YOU think?
Chris, do you know what problems Nick had? I set up the non-cryptic URLs, no problem. (But I had to drop Drupal for now because my host provider won’t fix the mySQL privileges unless I pay 10x my monthly fee.)
Chris, thanks for the info. Anything about that Technorati issue?
Scott, with the ‘keyword cloud’ I am not only talking about the keyword density of a page … I am talking about the keywords you want to push on your blog so that it shows up higher in search results.
In the context of my article I am talking about getting the keywords into the title and into the file name of a single article. So you have to do some research about your subjects before. Very useful is the AdWords tool from google to find out which might be the interesting keywords and phrases.
Info: https://adwords.google.de/select/tools.html
Google AdWords-Keyword-Tool: https://adwords.google.de/select/KeywordSandbox
Nick felt the pathauto module for drupal that does the keyword URLs was too buggy to use on performancing.
Thank you, Markus for your post. Please remember that nothing regarding Blogging is ever “too obvius.” Plus, no one I know ever failed by underestimating the experience-level of their audience.
By writing about what might seem “too obvious,” you will always appeal to a large group of newbies — like me.
After reading your message, I researched ‘keyword clouds’ and found an online keyword density checker.
So, knowing that a little bit of knowledge can be very dangerous, are you suggesting that the title of my post should contain words that appear frequently in the posting’s keyword cloud?
And Technorati doesn’t take the personal blog claims …
And of course I see the Performancing fellows here don’t have titles in their URL’s!
That’s a good category ‘reminder post’ 🙂
Before writing the article I was not sure if that subject is not too ‘obvious’. But then I thought about the traps which are not as obvious for the classical content author and decided it might be helpful … and published.
A good reminder post. Kind of a ‘proof read your finaly copy’ type thing, but definately a good reminer. A+. To many times I have accidentally published and wanted to make changes… but opted not to for these very reasons.
D
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