These days, the only word that is on every Webmaster’s lips is ‘Ranking’. The importance of ranking has been realized and people are striving to improve their website rankings in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) now more than ever. Various methods and techniques are currently in use in an effort to optimize their websites for improved rankings. Recently, an experiment has been carried out by Tom Nash   with the same criteria in mind. He is a software architect who likes to tinker and experiment with technology and methodologies. His aim is to learn and explore new ways to accomplish the sole goal of improving website rankings. Now, Tim has come out with the preliminary results of his experiment and he clearly states that this endeavor is only intended to improve the ratings and nothing beyond that. His experiment includes two of his clients’ websites. Both these websites are from UK and only clickthroughs from google.co.uk and not.com were monitored for the results. Let’s see what the results have been so far:

‘Uppercase Only’ Experiment:

Tim decided to keep the title tag entirely in upper cases for this phase of the experiment. He also designated 2 websites that appear in the same SERP as a comparison tool. The experiment was targeted at the lower ranking website.

In the above image, the top Blue line represents the higher ranking website in the two weeks after the upper cases were added to the title tag. The Brown line depicts the click through rates for the same website that was implemented with upper cases for the two weeks of testing. The green line denotes the previous two weeks. Although the fluctuation seems to be a big one, yet it should be kept in mind that for the top blue line between the ‘peak’ and the ‘trough’ of the graph, the click through rate is only 8.

In conclusion, the adding of uppercases to the title tag didn’t prove to be very successful compared to the previous two weeks. The lower ranking website’s graph statistics also differ considerably from the higher ranking website. This shows, that the website under performed constantly.

‘UPPERCASE and Click Me’ Experiment:

For this experiment, Tim chose to add ‘Click Here’ call to action button before the title tag, but kept the title in uppercases only. This is where Tim took advantage of the changes and ran a commercial that was related to the products featured in the SERPs on a Canadian TV show. This move did have a positive effect as the Click through Rates (CTR) showed an increase in the google.co.uk domain and also displayed a significant jump in the global google.com domain.

After the completion of this phase of the experiment, there seemed to be a jump in the higher ranking website (Blue Line). The brown line represents the same week as the blue line with the call to action and uppercases. The green line denotes the previous two weeks. This phase also indicates a 25% spike in the product related searches and click through rates. However, according to Tim, these results are still quite unimpressive.

After these two phases of experiment were over with, Tim then conducted a survey that included all website visitors arriving from google.co.uk, to get user feedback. The users were asked whether the experiment made any difference in their website experience. They were also presented with a snapshot of the Google SERP result for the previous two weeks and were asked to compare the Google result with the current look of the website:

1. Uppercase results – 90% users remembered clicking through the uppercase version.

2. Click here results – 100% all users remembered they clicked through the click here version.

The above image is a generic result from Google SERP and the users were asked to identify the elements that attracted them to the websites.

1. Uppercase results – 70% said it was the title that had inspired them.

2. Click here results – 100% all users remembered they clicked through the click here version.

Next the users were asked which of the two websites appealed to them first.

1. Uppercase results – 50% clicked the test site first.

2. Click here results – 75% clicked the test site first.

Well, so far the experiment has proven that neither of the experiments were able to show improved results and the click through rates remained low. Furthermore, it also became quite clear that changing titles didn’t help the search results look any better.

Well, I’ll be waiting for more on the experiment by Tim Nash and will be updating you with the results. Till then, I hope this information has been useful for our readers.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 1:53 am and is filed under Search Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.