A couple of months ago I changed the way that this blog’s browser titles are constructed, by placing the keywords first and the blog name last. I explained it in detail as well as the initial results in a post titled How Do HTML Title Tags Affect SEO?. For about two months I saw a negative change in my page rankings, but suddenly my rankings returned and improved. This chart shows the change over time.

So I am pleased to say that all three keywords traced rank better now. What I also learned in the process is that Google seriously penalizes certain changes to pages and that it can take a few weeks to months for the rankings to return.

It is said that title tags are one of the most important of the on-page factors for SEO. So I put it to the test. A couple of weeks ago I implemented the SEO Title Tag plugin for WordPress which updated the HTML titles of my pages to be “more SEO friendly”.

The idea was to give keywords more importance in title tags by placing them first, e.g. a page formerly titled “Da Vinci Planet ›› Blog Archive ›› Essential Portable Apps” is now titled “Essential Portable Apps | Da Vinci Planet“. Google’s search results pages have since updated and are now showing the “SEO friendly” page titles. The results are somewhat surprising! (more…)

I quite accidently stumbled on the search engine/tagging site Wink tonight. Quite accidently because I was looking for an update on the freeware presentation creation software called Wink: DebugMode (more on that Wink in another post). Since social bookmarking, tagging, social networking, social computing and all other social whatever stuff has been the topic at work over the last week, the Wink search engine really caught my attention. (more…)