Finding Missing Keywords in Page Titles
Having your target keyword in your page title is also an important factor in getting high search rankings. If you find that your pages are not ranking for a specific keyword, one possibility is that none of your web pages contain this term.
Both Google Analytics and Urchin allow you to filter the contents of the reports using regular expressions. This feature allows you to locate the pages that have the target keywords in the page title. This means that you can search the report for your keywords and variations and in the event that you have no pages that match the keywords you can take action to correct this.
To do this go to the Content by Titles report mentioned above and then enter a single target search keyword into the filter field. This will show the pages with titles that match this simple search. If there are no pages, then voila, this may be why your site doesn't appear in the search results for this keyword . For keyword phrases a little more work is involved and you need to create a simple regular expression. The reason for this is that there may be one or more words between the keywords in the title tag or the word order may change. E.g. if I want to rank for car sales Sydney and have a page title Sydney Car Sales then a simple search will not pick this up.
Here are some example searches:
Two keywords: (keyword1.*keyword2|keyword1.*keyword2)
Plurals are harder as there are different endings depending on the word. E.g. story and stories. To do these we need to use the word stem.
E.g. (stor(y|ies).*child[w']*s?|stor(y|ies)| child[w']*s?) will match childrens stories, children stories, child stories, childs story child's story, etc.
Once you have a list of pages you can then review them to see whether their title and content is appropriate to gain the ranking in search engines.
Fixing your page titles will take you some way along the path to getting good search engine rankings.
- Using Google Analytics for SEO
- Finding Missing Page Titles
- How to find keywords in your page titles
Web Analytics Association