Blogging - How titles & archive pages influence your traffic

The fish has to like the taste of the worm ... not the angler!

Info: This article was published on performancing.com in my personal blog on 15th of February 2006 and on the main page one day later (link to original on performancing.com). This version is edited a little bit to accomplish easier reading.

The basic questions:

• 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 analyze my blog statistics for the entry pages then can I see that there are always pages which are more successful than others. The first important conclusion is:

• The article title and the filename of the archived static page are two important points beside the body keyword density and the tagging!

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 analyzing 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 but myself.

Spend time on creating good article titles! As a result you will get more inbound traffic and higher listings in search results.

Kategories / Keywords / Technorati Tags: blogging, article, content, title, writing, SEO