This is obviously quite a basic point from any experienced seo guru, but for a lot of seo newcomers to the industry there has been a lot less emphasis on the importance of page tags.

Back in the late 90’s and early 00’s these tags were ravaged to death with keyword stuffing and abuse, after various Google algorithm updates they dropped the importance of Meta descriptions and Meta Keywords a considerable amount. What about the title tags though? From my point of view many years ago when I was young and new to the web design industry, title tags were just a method to explain page content with less emphasis on keywords.

Last week I assessed SeoUnique’s title tag for the homepage, I originally set it as:

Seo Recourses Blog | Social Media | Seounique

I followed some basic standards, not making the title contain too many characters, including important keywords and most of all making the title description as relevant as possible to the page content. As I have been busy with my day to day management of clients seo I have neglected to benchmark my own keyword positions. Last week I looked at two phrases that I considered important to rank well in for this blog. The first being “Seo Blog” and the second being “SEM blog” – both phrases perform well according to Google trends and the posts I make should be picked up by people looking for information on those subjects.

I of course looked for my current positions under the terms, I hoped to be listed somewhere in the top 20-30 pages of Google for “Seo Blog” but knew I wouldn’t rank anywhere under “SEM Blog” simply because that term is very rarely listed anywhere on the blog or in backlinks anchor text.

Last Week Positions:

Seo Blog: Page 54 rank 532
Sem Blog: Not in top 1000

Obviously I was disappointed with the results even though I knew in the back of my mind that it was an accurate representation of my efforts. Don’t get me wrong, I perform very well for my blog posts subjects, often making first page top 3 but obviously long tailed keywords don’t drive enough traffic day to day. I looked at my websites content and decided to go for the direct approach, once again giving an accurate representation of the pages content:

Seo Blog | Sem Blog | Seounique

I decided to cut the length even more and just contain the keywords I wanted to perform well in. I waited 5-6 days and once again checked my positions for the phrases:

Seo Blog: Page 18 rank 176
Sem Blog: Page 5 rank 43

Nothing else was changed on the blog at all, only the title tag. These rankings have held for over 4 days so it’s not an “updated content” ranking.

So why has the Google Rankings improved so much?

I should have put “Seo Blog” as my first keyword in the title description because essentially that’s what the site is, it’s the most accurate description of the content listed plus it’s the keyword I wanted to do well in. The second keyword was a gamble because I knew the terms were listed throughout the site on previous posts but rarely did the terms “sem” and “blog” run side by side with each other. I would say that again it’s an accurate description of the site so its justified.

Overall I moved 356 positions for the phrase “Seo blog” and staggering 953 positions for the phrase “sem blog”, I have already seen a natural increase in organic traffic for both terms, so next time someone says to you backlinks, backlinks, backlinks – reply title, title, title!