Ever ask yourself a question – Why I Don’t Get Much Traffic From Google?
This post is not to make an example out of anyone but rather help the person, who commented on my blog and in process I have discovered the issue. It is also designed to help you to ensure you don’t have similar problem as it will cost you dearly in terms of Traffic You Will Never Get!
In fact I want to share the link love with person, whose blog will be used as example to compensate for the publicity – CICILIA WIDHIANA PUTRI WIJAYA.
I have used her chosen keywords as anchor tag to hopefully help her benefit from it. Her blog looks pretty nice and I’m sure does all the things she wants it to do and this is not what I’m about to discuss here. I want to point out ONE GLARING problem with her blog that will pretty much ensure she will not get much in terms of traffic from Google.
See the image below and tell me if you find any issues…
This is the result of search For All pages from her site, and couple things I have highlighted:
- At the time of the search she has about 21 pages indexed in Google. I have highlighted them in yellow
- Each page has exactly same Page Title and Description! I have highlighted them in Green.
Bad thing about this is that she probably doesn’t even realize it! Even if she manages to score well for one of her chosen keywords, unless it is part of the Title, URL or Description – her chances to get the click greatly reduced!
How Do You Fix It?
While it can be done via code changes, etc – the easiest way is to use one of the WordPress plugins that can help you control meta Information of each post and page, even if you forget to add it!
- All In One SEO – a plugin great many WordPress bloggers use and one used on this blog and very well supported by developer.
- WordPress SEO Master – a new comer to the scene it acts like a Swiss army knife for WordPress SEO and has great many options!
I personally use All In One SEO and that is what I’ll base my fix on.
What you see highlighted in Green are Meta Title and Meta Description that can be quite easily defined as you create your posts or pages or simply allow the plugin do it on autopilot, although I recommend you make an effort to create Google Meta information for your blog posts because that is what displayed by Search Engines! Make your meta information stand out like an AD FOR YOUR BLOG POST!
See how I have done it for this post using options provided by All In One SEO plugin:
Once again, Meta Title and Meta Description are highlighted by Green. I also made sure to highlight one important factor – Number of characters. Google can only display so many on their Search Results Page and it pays to conform to their standard. According to Stomping The Search Engines 2 if your description displayed with “…” indicator – it gets less clicks!
A simple change that can mean more traffic for you!
And as result – each page of your blog will get its own page title and description to help you score better in Search results and get you well deserved traffic!
When you look at stats, what would you consider a good percentage to be for traffic coming from search engines? The majority of my traffic come from direct address, about 65% and usually about 25-30% of my traffic is search engine traffic.
I don’t use SEO plugins but I do make sure I have pretty good titles, categories and tags. Is this strong enough?
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I think the All In One SEO Pack is one of the most important addons available for WordPress – its probably something that should be incorporated into the base software in the future.
I looked at your site a little bit and I noticed it doesn’t have any meta descriptions or meta keywords. There’s a good chance that you’re missing out on some of your potential traffic because Google doesn’t have all the information it would usually use to determine which searches you belong in, and you’re missing out on that opportunity to decide what summary will show up under your link in those search results.
Thanks John,
Not sure what you mean that my site ” doesn’t have any meta descriptions or meta keywords”. Its all in there. I do miss sometimes but it is a routine for me to add those 🙂 please do point out something that I perhaps missed.
I think John was referring to Deanna’s site – while her title tags are in a better order, there are no meta descriptions or keywords. But there IS an awful lot of javascript in the head section of her pages… and that could also work against you as search engines ignore that completely.
Stephen, the javascript in the head section was inserted by plugins that I use. If search engines ignore it, how will it be detrimental to me?
Hi Deanna – it was an impression I got after just a quick glance over your source code… “wow – that’s a lot of javascript!” But without knowing exactly WHAT those plugins do, and what content they actually generate for you, it’s a bit hard to say too much…
Except that:
1. search engines don’t read javascript, so there could be content created that is not getting indexed, and (probably more significantly)
2. there’s a lot code which adds to the load time of your pages – and normally you’d try to reduce that wherever possible.
Perhaps it could be useful to look a bit closer at the plugins you are using which contribute to that and decide whether you really need them all. Considering you are also about to add another one into the mix 🙂
Let’s face it… a lot of people go overboard with activating unnecessary plugins, putting more and more load on your server and slowing things down to the annoyance of your visitors.
Hope that helps.
Great tips Stephen!
And I agree – the more plugins we add – more it adds to load time.
Oh, no I’m responding to Deanna’s comment 🙂 It was her website that doesn’t seem to include any meta information.
Ok, John, so I should go ahead and add one of the plugins so I can take advantage, hopefully, additional traffic that I can get from the search engines?
Sounds good. Thanks!
So should you use both of those plugins mentioned or just one?
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Cathy,
It is either / or choice. Use one of them.
Alex
You have highlighted a very common problem that many bloggers are generally unaware of.
I’ve even seen pages with NO title, yet the TITLE is the most important of all.
To have any chance of being found you need a keyword rich title and every page needs it’s own unique title.
Yes it can be done with code changes – and if theme developers could change the header.php file slightly it would be a lot better for everybody 🙂
The “default” way of doing the TITLE tag in the header.php file is:
name of blog : name of post (and it is presented in search results as you can see in the Google graphic above)
Now if they just swapped them around:
name of post : name of blog
then Google results would be a lot more meaningful.
The same situation exists with other templated softwares – shopping carts etc.
As far as the meta DESCRIPTION tags are concerned… which is one of the things these plugins can add – while Google quite plainly says they don’t need/use them, lots of other search engines DO so you should continue using them!
And (surprise, surprise) you will find that Google does actually make use of them in presenting search results… particularly on pages where actual page content is a bit light on – i.e. pages with lots of media and little text content.
Cheers
Stephen
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Thanks for the good article.
For this time I not use any SEO plugins. I just do it manually on the title and posts. I’ll try it later..
ps. Alex, may I know what plugin do you use for this threaded comment? 😉
Zack, I use SezWho plugin and reputation management. I have couple posts on it on my blog
Thanks Alex. I'll search that posts.
Alex,
I agree with your comments about the Title and description tags being tailored for each page.
I went to the CICILIA WIDHIANA PUTRI WIJAYA page that you referenced as an example. And unfortunately, it’s written in a forgein language that I don’t recognize.
I’d like to suggest that you might uses an example of a site that is written in English so that we could all make suggestion to the site owner to make their site better (including the use of specific keywords etc…).
Just my two cents.
Retired Early in Ajijic, Mexico,
Joel Smith
Hi, thanks for a useful post! I checked my site’s stats and was shocked. I do use the All-in-one SEO plugin, but Google uses the first few sentences from my post as the description. Since I also use the “What Would Seth Godin Do” plugin, the same text appears over and over. How can I correct this?
Lexi,
yes, this is a known problem for those who use WWSDG plugin and that is why you see it on my blogs AFTER the post. You can change that setting for the plugin. It also stands to reason to offer people to subscribe AFTER they read your content and not before they had a chance to evaluate it.
Once you do the change – be sure to check at least your most important posts and Add Manually Description and Title as shown in this post via All In One SEO plugin. It will be default use first sentence (160 characters to be exact) to use as description, which might not always be the best. I always add manual description that will have my keywords in it! Correct problems on at least your most important posts, then you can do others.
Update your XML sitemap and resubmit it via Google webmaster tools. Pray that Google will reindex new version of the page….
Can you please tell me how to fix this issue using code changes?
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I agree All in One SEO is the holy grail of plugins – I use it on all of my sites – although I have noticed that Google sometimes puts it’s own spin on the title and description depending on the keyword.
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I’m actually doing fairly well with Google, but currently I’m ranking much higher in Yahoo. I wish it was the other way around, though, because Yahoo is vastly inferior to Google.
Way to call someone out about their site. 😉 I use mostly the all-in-one seo pack on my blogs, which seems to be what most of you do to. Has anyone actually TRIED the SEO Master plugin yet? I’m always hesitant to change what works, but if it’s better than switching is worth it.
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Greg,
I didn’t just call – I have provided a full PR passing link for SEO and hopefully helped her.
Basically I don’t see how any blog can make it without doing a little SEO. I have been using All in one SEO for a while now and it has made a great deal of difference in my search engine traffic. Not just the traffic from Google.
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This was a great post, there were probably lots of people that went back to check their titles (myself included).
I noticed on your site, you have just the title of the post which will obviously ensure that you don’t have duplicate titles. I suspect in WordPress, under settings=>blog title, you probably have nothing in there.
Lots of sites have a blog title (in WordPress =>settings=>blog title) and use the All In One SEO plugin. When you check how google indexed them with site:domain.com, the titles show up as
post title | blog title
Google webmaster tools doesn’t seem to identify this as a duplicate title, even though the blog title would be the same on all the posts.
I’m wondering if there would be any value in removing that so that the titles get indexed just as post title, similar to what you have.
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I use blogger for a number of different reasons and have found that changing the title from the top of the page from name of blog/name of post to just name of post has increased the amount of traffic received from a number of search engines.
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Adding a title and description tag to each post can be a little tedious but as you rightly say it is essential if you want to benefit from Google and other search engines (which surely must be everyone). I use All in One SEO plugin on all my blogs – its one of the must have plugins, along with the Google Sitemap plugin.
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Thanks for this review, do you know about make my traffic is suck ??? Please give me the solution … your example website is my blog at http://www.putriwijaya.com, give your comment for increasing my traffic… please
i think i change my title format in this header of themes … it`s can fix my problem ?? please help me, how to increase my traffic on my site ? Sorry my site is indonesian language in this time, but tomorrow i will to translate to english language … All in One SEO can fix my proble ? i use seo default from wordpress. Thanks
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Putri,
I’m sorry for the usage of the Suck in deadline. I thought I have explained – just install the All In One SEO plugin. Edit all your existing posts and fill in the information as I describe n this post – you will be golden, assuming you have done your research for keywords you use in the posts.
This has been one of the issues I have been beating my head against the wall about. I’ve been putting my blog together, and have not been happy with the title and description repeating from page to page.
Hopefully my blog will never get called out like this. Hopefully it sends a little traffic their way though.
after i triying the plugin All In One SEO, my web has down with reason memory decrease .. what the solution ?? please help me
Putri,
Contact your webhost and request increase of memory allowed to PHP. I recommend you request at least 64MB.
Dear Putri,
I recommend to decrease the plugin use because it consume more memory, thats why you have problem with your site. If you know litle knowledge about html and php i recommend you to edit title, description, keyword manually. For example you can put diferent title, desc and keyword for each page on wordpress (index, category, single post, etc). Many wordpress resources about wordpress function you can find to how to get title and desc and how to separate that.
Thanks for that tip. I’ve always been curious on how Google ranks Meta Title and Meta Descriptions. Which one would you say holds the most weight with Google, post keyword optimization, Meta Title and Meta Description? thanks
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Post Title as it also becomes your Page Tittle. Everything else is just supporting it.
I.
Love.
All in One SEO.
Seriously. It’s a great way to get all of the SEO done in a few minutes. It is, by far, the most important “on site” SEO tool I’ve encountered. The first time I used it I watched my rankings explode for a site. 🙂
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All-in-one SEO is a great plugin and I’ve been using it since I started (not too long ago!) I didn’t know about the performance issues, so far I haven’t had any (I think) but its good to know about anyway.Scott – TheBrewClubs last blog post..Beer Review-Keegan Ales Mother’s Milk
Scott, thanks for commenting – I have edited your name. Please read comments guidelines provided.
Thank you for pointing out the importance of page title. I have now optimized my
page titles.
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Yes, SEO is a tricky topic. You have to carefully sculpt your way through or you can fall flat on your face without even realizing it. I used to use an SEO plugin, but my theme does it for me automatically, now. Atahualpa rules. 🙂
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But i heard that All in SEO pack adds to CPU load if you are on a shared server so i disable this plugin.I was continuously getting warning from my host for excess cpu resource usage so i asked it on webhosting talk and they told me wordpress is already optimized for seo so there is no need of this plugin.is it true?
David,
Both pieces of the info provided to you are incorrect from my experience. All In One SEO was never a plugin that created CPU issues in my experience, you probably have something else that causing it. WordPress out of the box is NOT SEO ready.
The All In One SEO plugin is awesome but I haven’t been using it too much I guess. I didn’t know about the meta description tag until now, for example. I was under the impression that atleast the title tag is populated automatically by the plugin. Am I right or do I have to manually do this for each post on my blog ?
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Thanks Alex, your tips are always helpful. I too prefer the All in One SEO plugin for WP. Keep the great information comming