Following last week’s post on the importance of Meta Tags (The 15 Most Important Onsite SEO Factors: Part 2 – Meta Tags) I wanted to continue the discussion on Onsite SEO Factors today and talk about the use of Body Text.
Body Text
The body text of a page is the actual text that can be seen by viewers when they visit your site. It does not include HTML commands, comments and other code that is going on behind the scenes. Body Text is important to Google because it shows how relevant your page is to a particular topic. You can have the nicest looking website in the world but if it’s full of graphics, flash, and javascript and very little text then you are not likely to come up favorably in the search engines.
300 Words Of Text
How much text should you have? A good rule of thumb is to have at least 300 words per page. What I’ve done with many of my articles is if the Body Text is over 1,000 words then I’ll split it up into two articles that can each rank separately for different keywords.
Keyword Density
The next element to look for is keyword density – how frequently should you put your keywords in the Body Text? If you repeat the same keyword too often you can get your page cut out of Google’s index for keyword spamming. To be on the safe side what I do is list the keyword once every one or two paragraphs on the page and make sure that there is valuable and relevant content around the keywords to make the web page useful.
Bold Important Keywords
Another important component to Onsite SEO is to bold the important keywords on your page. If you bold a keyword then you are showing that is more important than the other words on the page. Therefor you should bold the important words that you want to rank for where they appear in your Body Text. Note that this will have an impact on the design and you have to be ok with the look of the site but it can have a positive impact on your Google rankings.
First Sentence of Body Text
Just like it’s important to have your keywords at the beginning of your title tag (see The 15 Most Important Onsite SEO Factors: Part 1 – The Document Title), you want to also put the keywords in the first sentence of your body text. The logic is similar: The first sentence is more important than the rest of the page so it carries more weight. Keep in mind though that the first sentence should be a real sentence, not just a string of keywords. Try to write a complete sentence that encompasses some of the important keywords you are targeting.
Evan Carmichael
