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I blogged a few weeks ago about changing the theme of my blog to something simpler. Since then, I stumbled across Chris Pearson’s Cutline theme, and that’s what I’m now using.
Cutline has a couple of nifty features, and it claims to be search-engine friendly.
Cutline does nifty pullquotes like this
However, I did a few tweaks to improve my score on James Brausch’s Rasof On-Page Ranking Software. Most of them are counter-intuitive, or the opposite of what the SEO gurus teach – I’m interested to see the results.
James’ blog is currently at #1 on Google for the key phrase “internet business”.
After installing Cutline, my Rasof score for my chosen keyphrase, “online business”, was 1330. Not too bad, but I had done some optimisation with the previous theme. The first thing I did was to get rid of the <H1> tags. Heresy! I hear you cry. But Rasof’s figures are based on statistical analysis of actual search engine results pages, which indicates that the presence of <H1> tags is a negative ranking factor.
Rasof score after installing Cutline: 1330
Rasof score after removing the <H1> tag: 1506
The next thing I did was to add a hard-coded meta description to the header. WordPress doesn’t automatically add a description, and having your keywords at the beginning of the description is a positive ranking factor.
Rasof score after adding meta description: 1604
I also had a look at some of my archive pages. Cutline by default creates an “SEO’ed” title, which looks like this:
Title of the Post — Name of the Blog
Restoring the WordPress default, which looks like this:
Name of the Blog » Title of the Post
had this effect on my previous post:
Rasof score for the Cutline title: 245
Rasof score for the WP default title: 539
Why the difference? Because one of the most powerful ranking factors is having your key phrase at the beginning of the title. My key phrase is “online business”, so my title (and every post title) starts with “Online Business Blog”.
There are good reasons for putting the post name before the blog name, which are to do with useability. Jakob Nielsen wrote an excellent article about writing headlines, page titles and subject lines. But as far as Google is concerned, the keywords should appear at the beginning of the title.
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Putting the keyphrase at the beginning of the title is a very good idea. I will try this too.
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I did was to add a hard-coded meta description to the header. WordPress doesn’t automatically add a description, and having your keywords at the beginning of the description is a positive ranking factor.
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