SEO Title Tag + Wordtracker = Goodness

I’m back from Easter break & ready to get the ball rolling again with some new posts & ideas that will keep that money rolling in, I trust you all had a profitable Easter

So let’s get back into things. First up I’ve managed to wittle down the Blog Reviews to the last 7 of which I’ll be announcing today or tomorrow.

Secondly I thought I’d give you a little insight on how to really double your blog traffic from search engines.

On a blog there’s three types of traffic (excluding paid).

Direct Traffic: This is traffic that you get from feed subscribers & regular visitors.

Referral Traffic: The traffic that you get when you trackback, your blog is mentioned on another site or you get dugg.

Organic Traffic: The traffic that you generate from search engines.

You can manipulate each of these three traffic sources in different ways, however many people fail to do one thing in particular with their blog & that’s leverage off old posts. The focus of any blogger is to keep up to date with current affairs & stories so they can be the first to break an important piece of information & as a result leverage heavily off referral traffic & returning users.

However, what if there was a way to really bring your old posts back in style? Well now there is.

One of my main gripes & possibly the only one I ever had with wordpress was that you couldn’t set the page title (what we see between the <title> tags) independantly from the post title (the name of the post). Therefore this post would end up having the title “SEO Title Tag + Wordtracker = Goodness” which isn’t really very optimised for the Search Engines.

The rest of this post will show you how to optimise your title tags for WordPress in a way that will enable you to bring your old posts back from the dead & start generating decent traffic. Remember, if we managed to double each posts daily visitor count you’d be doubling your search engine traffic.

Here’s the process:

1. Installing WordPress Plugins
2. Grabbing a list of all the posts contained within your blog
3. Exporting the posts into an excel file that we can use to work on the title tags in a neat format
4. Research the title tags using Wordtracker’s free tool
5. Set the title tags in WordPress using the plugin
6. Sit back & measure results

So here comes the fun part, first up you need to be using wordpress for the following plugin to work:

Download the SEO Title Tag Plugin & Install it

There’s two important advantages to installing this plugin:

1. You can set independant title tags for pages, posts, categories & tags
2. You can get rid of your blog name coming before or after every post in the <title tag>

Once you’ve followed the instructions it’s time to grab a list of all the posts contained within your site. Download Xenu (which is free).

Xenu will allow you to grab a list of all the posts indexable in the search engines from your blog. To do this simply:

1. Goto File
2. Check URL
3. Input the URL of your Blog
4. Hit OK
5. When it’s done hit Control + T then save it on the desktop

You now have a tabbed file with all the posts from your blog. It’ll also contain other stuff in there like affiliate links, images etc so we need to clean it up.

1. Open up the file in Excel & just delete columns B through to M
2. Next highlight column A then hit Data then Sort & hit Ok.
3. Now go down the column & delete all the URL’s that aren’t posts.

You should now have a nice Excel file with your posts in Alphabetical format. Now name Column A (Post) & name column B (Title Tag).

You can now use this excel file to work on the title tags for all of the posts in your blog. I also like to make other columns where I can chart the increase of traffic using a particular title tag but you don’t need to do that.

Now open up the Free Keyword Suggestion Tool from wordtracker.

The aim here is to research much better title tags for your pages that will bring in traffic. So lets use this page as an example:

This page concentrates on Wordtracker, Title Tags & Increasing Traffic so I’ll get some numbers from those phrases & see if I can come up with anything else.

There’s not too much traffic for Wordtracker or Title tags & the term “Increase Blog Traffic” looks quite good. However it appears that term would be quite hard to leverage any traffic off since the top result has been featured on the front page of digg (& possibly other sites like techmeme) & also has 119 inbound links to that page alone.

Therefore I would then normally try & leverage traffic off the name of the plugin as I would assume a plugin like this would become pretty popular given what it allows you to do.

This would in turn give me a title tag such as: “SEO Title Tag for WordPress & Increasing Blog Traffic using Wordtracker” which is a good bit more seo friendly & should drive twice as much traffic, if not more than the original title.

Once I’ve decided on the title for a particular page I’ll then move onto the next page in the Excel list.

Another good reason to have a good title is for linking. If someone decides to link to your article, chances are they’ll use the title tag as the Anchor Text, so having keyword rich title tags can also help your rankings in more ways than one

I implemented this exact method less than 5 days ago & I’ve already seen a 32% increase in referrals from Search Engines.

Enjoy.