Wednesday, January 18  

How Do Web Page Rankings Work?

How Do Web Page Rankings Work?

Regular readers to this site will know I always try and back up what I say with examples. After all, it's much easier to make my point if I can give you a solid example.

In this post below I talked about the importance of a good title on your web page to help your search engine rankings and to increase the number of people who do click on your site from search engines.

With some of our clients making $5,000 per sale, an extra visitor or 2 can have a huge impact on the bottom line.

How I've Gone So Far

It has been 24 hours since I made the change to the title of the home page and the blogs that link from it. Here's how I've gone so far:

• 1. We've had one of our highest ever visitor days and our income from the Google Adsense ads has doubled. Yep, doubled.

What's happening is that more people are finding this site through search engines simply because they like the heading (Want to learn from a true web expert - welcome to Tailored Consulting).

My Next Test

What happens when I post a blog on this web site is that the page ranks well whilst it's on the home page, but as soon as it slides off after a week or so, the search engine rankings also die off.

This has to do with a multitude of factors - one of the big ones being that the post doesn't have a relevant title.

So my next test is this:

• Select a page from with the blog archives from a few years ago that no longer achieves a search engine ranking.
• Make that blog into a htm page.
• Give it a title tag.
• Call the page the phrase I want to be ranked well in Google.com for.
• Link to the page from the Articles page.
• Wait 3 days and see if the site achieves a top 20 ranking for the selected key phrase.

Okay, it's done:

1. I have chosen an article from the blog (it was from Thursday May 15, 2003 and was originally called "Best Value Dinner I've Ever Had").
2. The blog is now a htm page called up-the-creek-restaurant.
3. The title of the page is "Up The Creek Restaurant - Great Place, No Customers".
4. I selected the phrase from the blog/now page to be "up the creek" - I figure that it is competitive enough to make a top spot a little tricky. This phrase has quite a bit of competition.
5. I've linked to the page from my Articles page.

I have deleted the post from the blog - there is a risk of the new page being seen as duplicate content.

Now I'll just sit back and see if the title makes a big difference (the only other difference between the blog and the page is the page has the link from the Article page to it and the link from this post.)

Cheers

Brendon