From time to time you may want to fine tune your search phrases and page titles. One way to evaluate whether or not to make a change is to view all the phrases that resulted in traffic to a particular page to see if there are words, wordings, or phrases you had not considered in your initial best guess. Let's look at how this works on one of our pages. Let's use "estimating website budgets."

I have a couple ways of seeing which phrases resulted in traffic to specific pages. The easiest is the NewfangledCMS Google tracking application we have installed. Form the Google numbers I can open up the details and if I click the total number it will open a window that shows all the phrases used to get from Google to this page. Not surprisingly "website budget" is the most frequently used phrase. My title is currently "Estimating a Website Budget." If I search in Google using the phrase "website budget" I'm currently listed fifth. My on-page title is "How Much is a Website." If I wanted to improve my ranking from fifth I could change my on-page title to "Website Budgets." But in this case the on-page title "How Much is a Website" is the main title of the newsletter. And because I write for people, not primarily for search engines, I'm going to be content with fifth place and keep the current page title and browser title.

Besides, check this out. If I scroll down the list I start to see the long tail of search phrases that contributed to our overall traffic. If I count up those instances that resulted in only one or two visits, the long tail of unique phrases, I'll see that the unique phrases, as a group, add far more to my overall traffic than the few phrases that are used more consistently. Here it is again, the rare phrases are out performing the popular.

Our Google tracker also has a cloud view of the word usage to see visually which words are most commonly used in search phrases that lead traffic to this page.

This is another example of not having to exert too much effort going after frequently used phrases. The many phrases we never even considered targeting end up out performing our intended phrase anyway. Due diligence and accuracy in optimization certainly helps, but adding new content regularly is by far the most fruitful activity for search engine optimization.

If you don't have our Google tracker installed you can see the same page-based phrase list using Google Analytics. Go to the Content area and click on the Content by Title tab. You can use the search field at the bottom of the list to find a particular page, in this case "Estimating a Website Budget." Click through to the detail screen for this page and then segment the report by Keyword. Again, we see the long tail of many keywords and phrases used to get traffic from Google to this particular page.   next >