How I Became Number 1 - Sifting Through Keywords
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I looked at the 14,399 unique keywords searched to find my site in January 2008. With Excel, I randomly choose 300 keywords to test. I then found the highest ranked pages for my site which included these keywords. There were examples with keywords in the front of titles, in the middle and all the way in the back. I removed the title of my site from the beginning of all 300 test pages of my site. While ranks improved more times than not (59%), sometimes they stayed the same (11%), and surprisingly often, they fell (30%) for one reason or another. Interestingly, some keywords at the very end of titles were not even in the top 1,000 SERPs, and then jumped WAY up after the web site name was removed. I don't have this one completely figured out, but I now believe search engines ignore words beyond x characters in title tags when returning search results.
So for example, the keyword "example" on Yahoo.com:
Variety of remedies available to patients for "example" (rank #1)
MySiteTitle.com - Variety of remedies available to patients "example" (rank 882)
Regardless, 30 days after I flipped the switch on this project, search engine traffic was up 18.9% during the four months following the change over the four months preceding the change. (And yes, I understand the many variables at play here).
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