If you’ve read my blog, or visited my other blog or my SEO Magic post you know that I’ve spent some time trying to solve the mystery that SEO seems to be. After reviewing some Google Webmaster tools reports, I decided to make one tiny change: swap the word “tutorial” for “example” in the title of one of my pages. Result: it worked!
A very popular page on this blog is my example on using the Javascriptserializer class (JavascriptSerializer Example – Parsing JSON). In this page I give an example of how you can use this .NET class to parse JSON formatted strings into rich .NET objects (if you have not read it yet, you should).
For nearly two years, the title had been “Parsing JSON objects with Javascriptserializer – A Tutorial.” It’s an esoteric topic, to be sure. Nonetheless, I found it to be a useful class so I decided to write an article on how I had used it. Apparently, I’m not the only one who’s had to parse JSON in .NET. So this page has found some regular traffic over the last two years.
But in reviewing search terms used by people landing on my site, I noticed that people searching for an example on Javascriptserializer were not visiting my site. Only people who wanted a tutorial on Javascriptserializer. Most importantly, people who wanted an example, outnumbered those that wanted a tutorial. So, being the entrepreneur that I am (not a good one it seems), I thought long and hard and decided to change the title of my page. So I re-titled it to JavascriptSerializer Example – Parsing JSON as it is today.
The results have been unmistakable: those people who prefer examples to tutorials have started visiting my site in far greater numbers. Well, not that great a number (not enough people wake up thinking to themselves “I should really get to know the Javascriptserializer class better”). But in relative terms, it’s a great increase in traffic.
So, why is tutorial such a turn off? I have my theories (I may post on those later). But the lesson to be learned is: review your reports in Google’s webmaster tools. They provide a ton of information. They hold the secrets to not only getting you good page rank, but they tell you how to increase traffic to your site. It doesn’t do you any good to have good page rank, but no traffic actually coming to your site. In my case, swapping out one word for another, results in SUCCESS!
If you have specific questions, please send them along. I can try to answer them or, I may write a post if enough people ask (I’m that kind of guy!). In the meantime, I have to convert some more tutorials to examples.
If you like this post (or any of my others), please buy me a beer.
great post thank you