A WordPress tweak that doubled Google traffic

In my last few podcasts I’ve been doing a series of tweaks designed to raise a website’s ranking. On one site, shown in the last week or two, I added title elements to each page. It’s been moving up in the rankings every time I tweaked the page, but that particular move caused it to jump to #4 in Google. You don’t have to do a lot to bring your rank from the second page up to even the top half of the first. It’s all about looking at the details and changing them to forms that Google likes better.

One change I did recently was to change the URL structure of the site’s pages. A lot of times, the ending of the URL will read something like clothes.com /september7/1110/blueshorts. A lot of the time, Google will just ignore that.

I worked with one site, going into the general settings on WordPress. You can choose how to title your pages there, and the best way is to simply use domain/post. In the previous example, you should chance it to clothes.com/blueshorts. Google will read that and improve the ranking of all the pages around it. Oddly enough, the page itself may not move, but all the pages associated with it will improve.

Another problem with elaborate URLs is that when they have a date attached, readers can look at them and think they’re old news. If you’re writing evergreen copy it doesn’t make a bit of difference when you posted an article. Fewer clicks from readers equal fewer click-throughs, lowering the authority of your site.

It’s all about making gradual small changes that improve your whole site. Don’t just concentrate on five keyword strings. Target your whole site and your rank in those strings will go up automatically.

Jim Stewart is a leading expert in search engine optimisation. His business StewArt Media has worked with clients including Mars, M2 and the City of Melbourne.