What would happen if…? I am a person who always asks that question. I love to test and follow up to see what factors can make a situation better or worse. So it was natural for me to track the movements of a little experiment I recently did with SEO copywriting. I will gladly share my findings with you.
Before I do, however, I want to make a couple of things very clear. The result of this experiment will not be the same for every key phrase on every page of every site. There are too many unknown factors at play in the overall SEO equation. Not to mention, all keyphrases are not created equal and all sites are not created equal. Also, this experiment does not take into account link popularity, which is a very important factor in achieving high rankings. With that being said, let me show you how I took the home page of one of my sites, which didn’t even rank in the top 50, and caused it to rank in the top 10.
First of all, I’m not a big fan of checking the rankings regularly. I don’t run ranking reports for all my sites to make sure they are all in the positions I want them to be for each given keyword phrase. I’ll do it from time to time just to satisfy my own occasional curiosity. This experiment started when I noticed that the home page of one of my sites was prominently featured on a key phrase that didn’t seem to appear anywhere in the text. Upon further investigation, I saw that the key phrase was included in the ALT tags (also known as image attribute tags) and that it was also included in the title tag.
I knew that ALT tags used to have a lot of weight in engines, but they had lost importance because site owners had severely abused the tag. Had the ALT tags been reset to their level of importance? I decided to find out.
The keyword no. #1 was currently on ALT tags and the title tag, so I decided to remove the keyword in the title tag. This would allow me to see if the ALT tags alone could maintain the position in the search engine results pages (SERPs). To make things more interesting, I also decided to do some research and find a keyword that was a bit more competitive and insert it into the title tag. The same day I removed keyword #1 from the title tag, I inserted keyword #2. My home page was not ranked in the top 50 at that time for keyword #2.
A few days later, Googlebot showed up and boosted my homepage to position #18 for keyword #2. Not bad! The page dropped one spot (from #17 to #18) for the #1 keyword since the phrase was removed from the title tag.
Keep in mind that these are not the most competitive keywords ever known. Each received between 100 and 200 searches a day. Also, the home page of this particular site had been (and still is) ranking well for years for other key phrases and had a positive legacy with Google.
Five days later, keyword #2 moved up three positions to #14, while keyword #1 stayed the same. Things stayed in their status quo for about 10 days and then started to change again. The #1 keyword, the original one that was previously in both the ALT tags and the title tag, is gone entirely. It was not found in the top 50. The #2 keyword, which was only found in the title tag and nowhere else, dropped to position #25.
Four days later, the #2 keyword moved back up the rankings and was now at #16. To see if I could improve the rankings further, I started making small tweaks to the page attributes. I added keyword #2 to the ALT tags (taking the places where keyword #1 once was), and I also added keyword #2 to the body text. The catchphrase was added to a bold subheading and in three places within the body text: none of which were above the fold. No tags were added to the main title, and no keyword density formula was followed for the body text. No other page on my site used this term as anchor text on links pointing to the home page. That gave the page a keyword placement at:
title tag
alt tags
body copy
Seven days later, the home page hit the top 10 for keyword #2!
So what does all this mean? Simple. There is no single main factor in search engine ranking. It takes balancing, testing, and tracking to figure out what works for your particular pages. The best thing to do is to do exactly what I did…start one step at a time and track your progress. Did something cause a positive move? Keep him. If something causes a negative change, remove it.
I’m not done with this page yet. I’ll keep trying different things from time to time just to see what happens. Maybe add anchor text links from internal pages to the home page. You could try writing articles with keyword-rich anchor text links to help boost rankings more. There are many acceptable practices that I can implement for this page (or any page) that will allow me to observe changes in ranking. As the old saying goes, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” A diversified approach to SEO writing that includes tags, text, and links is always a good start on the road to the top 10 rankings.
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