Optimizing for Search Engines, Descriptive Text - Part Five.
Descriptive Text/Content.
The most important part, what makes or breaks the web pages’ chances of getting indexed correctly is the content, the text. This is what is going to determine where the web page is going to be placed in the SERPs.
I am sure everyone has already heard the saying “Content is King”, and it is. The content is where you’ll need to spend your time developing a theme by the use of keywords. It can’t just be filled carelessly with keywords, there needs to be structure and meaning. The text needs to be readable and valuable to the reader.
Audience
There are two types of audience that you are going t want to please, the human and the bots. Human reader will be able to tell whether a piece of writing is valuable or not. The bots will not be able to access that but they will be able to pick out the key words and by analysing the patterns on a page they will be able to determine if it is Search Engine SPAM or usable content.
Why please both types of audience?
When a human reader finds your content valuable he will pass it on to his friends or will link to it from his website. If your page gets a link, the page’s rating goes up. The search engine finds the page more important. If you page does not get a link but at least gets a human reader that finds it valuable, you gain a reader that will probably come back and visit the page again and hopefully through word-of-mouth gain a few more readers.
Bots are easy to please. You give them text that is not SPAMy, that contains your keywords and it is a happy bot. It will index your page according to the keywords it finds and it is on it’s way to the next page. Once the bot indexes your page you will reap the rewards from the search engine traffic.
Keyword Density
When writing keyword oriented content for a web page you need to keep in mind that the text needs to be humanly readable and not just that, it has to be valuable. So when you read a piece of writing that contains the same keyword or key term every other sentence you can tell that there is a hidden agenda (well, not so hidden) in this text, that it was written for SEO and poorly. You also start to loose interest in it because the writer did not have the reader’s best interest in writing this text. This piece of writing becomes worthless to the human reader.
Write for humans and then once it is all written, go in and add your keywords into the text where it makes sence. The text should contain 2% to 4% keyword density to be effective and still valuable to the reader. Here is a Keyword Density Tool that you can use to check your writing with.