text icon
It may be useful to change the title and perform some on page optimization of your posts after they have been published, to better target the search terms used to find your page.

Keeping an eye on your SERP positions for your entry pages can help you to understand when it can be worthwhile changing the title of one of that pages.
Benefits:

  • If you do not perform very well for a given search, you can tweak title and keywords to get better results (SERP positioning) for that search
  • Usually bloggers link to a page with its title, thus changing the title can bring you links with different targeted anchor text
  • Often by changing the title and a few sentences in a post, is it possible to target a niche near to the one you’re in, helping you to wider your visitors base

Here’s an example of how this can work: some days ago, I changed the title of my Google Guide from “Ultimate Google Search Guide” to “Ultimate Google Guide”, and than to “Google Search Tips (Ultimate Google Guide)”, and I inserted the term “Google Guide” a couple of times in the text of my post.

Here are the serp results before and after the changes (google results)

search term ranking on 3/28/07 ranking on 3/31/07
google guide 12 7
google search 124 102
google tips 521 84
ultimate google guide 1 1
ultimate google search 3 3
ultimate google tips 2 2

I don’t care I moved from position 124 to position 102 for “google search”, I don’t care I moved from 521 to 84 for “google search tips”, but being promoted on the first page for “google guide” it’s something that can really boost my traffic :)