Writing Web Content for High Rankings
The single most effective tool that will help you get your website ranked well with top search engines is relevant content. If you write straightforward, descriptive text about your organization, product or service you will likely do well.
Here are some specific best practices and tips you can employ as you update your site text.
- Select two or three of your most important keywords related to your business and try to use them 3-7 times for every 100 words in your web content. Intersperse other keywords throughout the text as you can. Don’t go too crazy though – make sure the text remains interesting and readable. If it reads like a big list of keywords, search engines will likely consider it spam and throw it out.
- When writing, consider language your audience would use when looking for your product or service. Specific descriptions and a conversational tone are generally more successful than sweeping statements and marketese. It’s the difference between:
“Our product out-performs the competition.”
and
“Our energy-efficient toasters are safe, reliable, affordable and environmentally friendly.” - Use keywords in the headers of your pages. (Headers are the titles above your content sections; on this page the header is "Writing Web Content for High Rankings".) Headers are considered more important content by search engines than the rest of your text.
- Aim for 200 – 400 words on your homepage. That is roughly the amount of text on this page.
- When inserting links in your content, check that the link text is intuitive – in other words, it should be obvious to your visitor what they are going to get when they click on the link. Rather than “click here now” you might write “visit the National Toasters of America website.” Link text is also considered more important content than regular content by search engines.
