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If you are wondering why there has been a larger-than-usual time lapse in my post, it is because I was doing a case study on my last post about simple blogging seo tweaks and how to maximize your search engine rankings with simple changes in your blogging config.
I received an email arguing that removing your blog keyword(s) from your title improves relevancy. Now instead of arguing point vs point, I thought I would give it a simple test. Please know that this is only a FOUR DAY case study on my blog, and results may vary.  My short-term conclusion is that my traffic increased by quite a bit. Feel free to try both with keyword titles and without, and see which brings more search engine traffic for you.
I had not posted a single post in four days, and the final conclusion for my case study was that my search engine traffic went up 3.30% according to Google Analytics. I think this is a major improvement because many of my pages are still cached with the old title, so if everything moved over I might even get lucky enough to get a 5-15% increase in search engine traffic.
While I saw a massive increase in my own experiment, feel free to argue in the comments if you like seeing your keywords on every page. For me, I will stick to using only the relevant title because it is sending me additional traffic.
On another note, my popular post about link building with Flickr seems to have caught the attention of the big folk over at Yahoo. They have added ‘nofollow’ to all external links, so the Google search engine benefit has been nuked. I still feel it is a great idea to comment on images that get popular on Digg because of all the traffic and for the little benefit on the non-Google search engines.
I didn’t think it would take very long at all for Yahoo to catch on to “spam”. I’m surprised it was ever dofollow at all.
I agree with removing the site name out of every title. That will remove duplicated keyword. I will follow your idea.
There are lots of studies you can do to prove someone wrong as I think there are tons of ways to do things.
I couldn’t understand much of the part of this post as I am a Noob. but i will take it as a stepping stone towards SEO.
Can you name me few resources which can teach me SEO???
Thanks
Using your blog as a test case and documenting the results was really useful. Thanks again for another valuable post that’ll change my blogging strategy. You’d think that keeping your title there would GIVE you relevancy because keyword density is so important, but apparently not. Huh.
Thanks for this tip. Another gem from Mixed Market Arts.
I used a program that analyzes the pages in the top 10 for a keyword and analyzes my page, and that was one of the tips they had was to not have it in every post title. That helped me to not over-saturate my page with the keywords.
Write relevant posts about your keyword, and you can naturally slip your keyword into a post, and that will help to improve your relevancy in the search engines.
I’m a little confused about what you tested here? Your titles with keywords turned off or on? It is a little vague.
My argument no matter what your testing, would be that your sample size is very small and isn’t credible.
Over time your blog is naturally going to grow as traffic, inbound links, bot crawls, RSS subscriptions, etc. continue to increase YOU SHOULD EXPECT a slight increase like this. Besides I wouldn’t consider 3% a significant increase to warrant saying your study was a success either.
You could probably take a picture of someone taking a shit and post it on your site and see your traffic increase over the short term. Ok I take that example back, that would significantly increase your traffic, because with the way the internet is it would probably go viral!
Can you tell I’m taking a statistics class right now?
The test was for the html title’s of my blog post. “Off-topic Reading | Make Money Blogging” or just “Off-topic Reading” like it is now.
My SE traffic has been 2-10% for the last three months. It was 13-16% on the four days where I did not even post. With the way Google updates indexed pages, it will hopefully be an additional 3% when all of my pages that Google indexed are with the new titles.
Like I said, its not exact but in my personal experience it went up. Feel free to try the opposite if you disagree.
Ah I got you now. Yeah I pulled off the “| %blogname%” a while back. I think you should definitely write a follow-up post in a month from now, cause you should have a lot larger sample size at that point. I don’t have any data proven it’s better either, but I hate seeing that junk when I look at search results or on Social Bookmarking sites… Maybe it’s good branding strategy, but from that respect nobody cares.
Thanks for the additional explanation.
In my opinion the one argued with you is right. Maybe the logic of it is putting on keywords limit the search to your keywords only.