28. January 2019
The way you write your website text is highly important for your position in search results, but is this the most important aspect that influences your ranking?
Let us start with the basics of SEO
Among the multiple factors in SEO ranking, the first elements to consider are these four:
- The most important aspects of SEO are connected to the user experience and can be seen in metrics such as high CTR, low bounce rate, time spent on the website, number of visited pages per session, number of direct visits.
- And right after these, the second fact that matters in terms of SEO is directly connected to the online notoriety (off-site SEO): number of backlinks/referrals from relevant websites, number of backlinks from relevant anchor text, number of mentions on social media, the presence of a Google My Business account, etc.
- There are technical aspects of SEO that influence ranking: load speed, website security, responsiveness, lack of errors, duplicate content and others.
- Your website content.
Here are the 5 things to take into account when you are writing your website text
Length of content
According to SWEOR, which is using data from serpIQ, the longer the content, the higher the Google rank. On average, first page results have content between 2000 and 2500 words. Other research seems to support these findings, while also insisting on the quality of that content. If you use an SEO tool for your website, it usually recommends you write at least 300 words, if you want to be ranked at all. But the trend is towards longer articles. Based on several sources, Clickseed concludes that you should aim for at least 1000 words per page, for SEO purposes.
But your content may well consist of more than words. You may have videos, images, rich content, apps or other content on your page. Keep in mind that search engines also look at the text-code ratio. A page with very little text relative to code, will not rank well. It is generally accepted that you should aim for at least a 15% ratio between text and code.
Keyword density
While you write, always keep in mind the keywords you would like to rank for. Try to use those keywords (which can be one word or a string, that we sometimes call a long-tailed keyword) as much as possible in the text. However, do not push it to the point it will hurt user experience. Yoast recommends a keyword density between 0.5% to 2.5% on your page. That means using your keyword once or twice every 100 words.
Placing keywords
It may well be that where you place your keywords is more important than how much you use them. Placing the keyword in your title, your URL address, in your subtitles (highlighted by the <h2>, <h3>, <h4>… tags), in your post tags and the first paragraph of your content gives added SEO value. Using them in bold, italic or underlined used to also matter, but is not relevant anymore.
Writing meta descriptions and other meta
The meaning of meta text is “text describing text”. Meta texts are not visible to users, but they are some of the first places where web crawlers look for relevant information. The most important meta text is the meta title (<title>) and the meta description (<meta name=”description” content=”…”>). These are the meta that also show up in the SERP. Placing your keywords in these areas is even more valuable than placing them in the areas from point nr. 3.
So, in addition to your normal text, write up your meta title and your meta description. The meta description should go up to 300 characters and should be a condensed mini-summary of your content.
Alt Text for images
There is text in all kinds of places on a webpage. One of those places is the “alt description” for images, which works more or less like a meta description for photos. Use it to get more keywords in. You may well rank better in Google Image Search as well as provide useful details for special operating systems such as the ones used for persons with visual disabilities.
So, try to apply these to some of your current content and see what happens. There will not be an immediate effect, but keep tracking visits to your posts through Visitor Analytics and see if organic search traffic increases.
Good luck!
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