“Think of your visitors” What are your visitors going to be searching for? Is your site full of industry jargon which they probably won’t use in their search terms? How do users read your website? How often do you really read a webpage? …How often do you “skim-read” until you find the information you’re after? How do search engines read your webpages?
Turning off images and style sheets for your webpage is often a good indication of how effective the page is at conveying the information within it. Remember that search engines can’t read the fancy text, the beautiful images and all those colours.
This document is a guide to what can you do to make your site perform better in the search engines just by changing the way the content is written.
There is also another positive side effect to writing effective content for your website – accessibility. Remember some people can’t see your website (just like the search engines!) so making sure your content is effective will also aid those users’ experience of your website.
It costs nothing to do and is the single most effective way to boost your search engine rankings!
Make good use of page titles & headersEnsure each of your website’s page has a unique title that describes the page well. The title is not actually shown on the webpage itself but it’s this text that appears in bookmarks, on the menu-bar of your browser and it’s what most search engines use as the title in their listings.
For instance, if your site title is "Dave’s Cars", a visitor may want to bookmark your home page and the page for a red convertible you have on the forecourt. If all of your pages have the title "Dave’s Cars", then a visitor will have trouble finding your site again in their bookmarks. If, on the other hand, your home page has the title "Dave’s Cars” and your page about that classy red convertible on the forecourt has the title "Red Convertible at Dave’s Cars", then visitors can glance at the title to see what it's about and can easily find it in the bookmarks later. Note that “at Dave’s Cars” comes at the end of the sentence… There’s a reason for this but we’ll get onto that later.
Search engines index pages based on the words contained in them, and including descriptive titles helps search engines know what the pages are about. The search engines will often compare your page titles to your page headings… Let’s review those now.
Breaking up text with descriptive headings and sub-headings allows site visitors to easily see what each section of the page is about.
The main heading (the H1 tag) on the page provides a brief overall view of what page is about. The opening paragraph should give a brief conclusion of the page (because you've “front-loaded” the page content… Again hold back we’ll get onto “front-loading”/”front-weighting” your content shortly).
The sub-headings (your H2, H3 etc tags) should group on-page content into logical groups, to allow site visitors to easily access the information that they're after. For example your main heading (H1 tag) may contain “Latest industry news”; your subheadings (H2 tags) may then be “United Kingdom”, “United States” etc if your news happens to be regional. If you wanted to further categorize your content you may add (H3 tags) such as “England”, “Wales” and so on.
Again this will help search engines understand how the content on your page is structured but it also has a positive effect for accessibility (as do most of the techniques in this document) as screen-readers use the headings to create links into sectors of your page so users can jump to relevant information in your page quickly and easily.
Use Bold Text & ItalicsAnother way to help users locate information quickly and easily is to bolden important words in some paragraphs. When site visitors scan through the screen this text stands out to them, so do make sure the text makes sense out of context.
Use descriptive link textIn the same way that bold text stands out to screen-scanning web users, so does link text. Link text such as ‘click here’ makes no sense whatsoever out of context so is useless to site visitors scanning web pages. To find out the destination of the link, site visitors have to hunt through the text both before and after the link text.
Screen-readers will also show users a list of links in the page… Understandably in this instance “click here”, “click here” and “click here” next to all of your top three news articles suddenly becomes pretty annoying and irrelevant.
Using listsUsing a bulleted or numbered list is a really simple and effective way to convey information. Lists are easier to scan for the user so they can quickly grasp your products key features quickly and easily and therefore ascertain whether or not it is relevant to them.
“Front-weighting” or “Front-loading” your ContentOK I’ve already mentioned this a couple of times but what is it?
Front-loading content means putting the conclusion first, followed by the what, how, where, when and why. The first line of each paragraph should contain the conclusion for that paragraph.
This theory all goes back to how users read your webpages… When you “read” a webpage you tend to scan it for the information you need… You’ll often read the first few words of a paragraph to ascertain what it’s about and then move on. This is why front-loading can be so effective.
Because each paragraph should contain just one idea, concept or theory users can do all this safe in the knowledge that if they jump to the next paragraph they won't be missing any important information.
Front-loading also applies to the entire web page, as well as paragraphs. The opening paragraph on every page should always contain the conclusion of that page. This way, site visitors can instantly gain an understanding of what the page is about and decide whether they want to read the page or not.
Unfortunately many websites don't adhere to this guideline and end up writing page content in a story-format. On each page there's an introduction, middle and conclusion, in that order. Unfortunately, when scanning through web content we don't tend to read all the text nor read all the way to the bottom of the screen. As such, you may easily miss the conclusion if it's left until the end.
Although there is no hard evidence to back up the theory that front-loading content can affect your search engine rankings it is fair to assume that search engines will evaluate the content of your page by first reading the title; then checking the H1 (your main heading) is relevant; then the subheadings; and then the body text to make sure that the page contains relevant content.
Common/ Key Words, Descriptions & MetadataYou may or may not be aware that you can apply “metadata” to your webpages. Metadata is a concept of tagging data - the dictionary definition actually says it’s “data about data”. For example in your local library books might be categorized into sections ie. “Children’s books” or “Biographies” this is metadata.
Webpages can store this information in custom tags that are added to your webpage called “metatags”. This information is not seen by the users when viewing your webpage but some search engines use this additional information to help index your webpages in their databases.
There are two main types of metadata tag that you can add to your document namely “keywords” and “description” – both are pretty descriptive of their use. Generally these tags are written by your webmaster or, more often than not, excluded altogether from a webpage - which can decrease your SEO rankings for some of the search engines.
Therefore including and writing these tags effectively, in the same way you would the rest of the content, is important. Be careful not to duplicate the first paragraph of your webpage in the description metatag and use it as an opportunity to describe your document in another way; where this description needs to sum up the entire page.
Some search engines use the description metatag as the “introduction” text in their listings so make sure it makes sense and presents your webpage in an enticing manner... It’s often the first snippet of information users will read about your webpage!
Using “Keywords” or Common WordsIt may sound obvious, but if you want to rank highly in the search engines for a certain set of keywords, but don't use those keywords or phrases on your webpages, then ranking for those phrases will be difficult, if not impossible.
You can add these as a comma separated list in your “keywords” metatag but should also use them throughout your textual content so the search engines can match a users search terms (keywords) to your document.
I cannot emphasise enough the importance of choosing these keywords carefully. Always think of what your users will search for… For example if you were a watch manufacturer and your new product was named “Tickomatic 5000” it’s unlikely users will search for a “Tickomatic 5000” but they may search for: “watch”, “watches”, “timepieces” etc. If you’re struggling to think of keywords a good tip is to use a thesaurus for example http://thesaurus.reference.com
Be careful not to overuse keywords as some search engines will see it as “spamming” and blacklist your webpages from their indexes.
The use of images to convey informationImages on a site can look great - but search engines can't “read” them, and not all visitors can. Make sure your site is accessible and can be understood by visitors viewing your site with images turned off in their browsers, on mobile devices, and with screen readers. If you do that, search engines won't have any trouble. Some things that you can do to ensure this:
• Don't put the bulk of your text in images. Reserve images for graphical elements. If all of the text on your page is in an image, it becomes inaccessible.
• Take advantage of alt tags for your images that enhance the content – it’s a common mis-conception that “all” images should have alt text.
• Make sure that alt text is descriptive and unique. For instance, alt text such as "picture1" or "logo" doesn't provide much information about the image. "Charting the path of stock x" and "Company Y" give more details.
• Don't overload your alt text. Be descriptive, but don't stuff it with extra keywords – this can actually have a negative effect on SEO.
Whilst we’re on the subject…Google Image Search enables you to opt-in to have your site’s images indexed. This enables Google to use your images in the “Google Image Labeler”, which harnesses the power of the community for adding metadata to your images.
Domain and file naming conventionsIt used to be a common misconception, among many search engine optimization consultants, that filenames and domain names didn’t affect search engine ranking as it was pretty easy to name your file “cars-automobiles-motors-car-motorcar-automobile.html”, for example, and therefore spam the search engines with lots of keywords… Will I’m afraid they do have quite a dramatic effect.
You’ve probably seen several URLs with variables passed to them such as:
www.irrelvant-domain-name.com/news.asp?article=1234
Now take away everything you learnt thus far about writing your content.
Let’s say the above link goes to a page about the latest advances in medication for flu. Nothing in the domain name, or file name, tell us anything remotely related to our search terms of “medication for flu”. Now consider:
www.your-medication.com/viruses/flu/news/
Immediately we have three possible keywords in our URL that the search engine can relate our search too.
Try typing “medication for flu” into Google, for example. You’ll notice some of the top results contain keywords (in bold) as a part of the URL in the listings.
Therefore always try to name the files you create appropriately and place them into well-named folders on your web server as a quick and easy boost to your search engine rankings.
Labels: accessiblity, content, copy, copywriting, optimisation, seo
