Search Engine Optimisation
A guide to SEO for the small business owner
This site is maintained by Seggy T Segaran, author of the book “The battle to get traffic to your website”.
Optimising page content – Web page Content
Web page content is very important in influencing the position on the results page of a search engine. They generally look for the following factors when analysing a web page for the most important keywords.
Headings Search engines give importance to the words used on the headings on a web page. This is used by the programming language used to create web pages (HTML) to make heading in the text stand out. It is a good idea to make sure that the web page content makes good use of headings.
Keyword prominence Search engines give more weight to keywords found at the start of a section of text than the rest. If there is a paragraph of text then it is better to break this up into smaller sections and have a HTML heading <h1> or <h2> for each section. Every time the search engine sees a heading, it will start the prominence criteria again. This is another good reason to use headings in web page content.
Keyword proximity Search engines also attach some importance to how close keywords are to each other. For example when optimising your text for the phrase “bike hire Yorkshire” it is important to keep these words as close as possible.
Keyword density How many times a keyword or phrase occurs on the page compared to the total amount of words is defined as the keyword density. This is considered by search engines when ranking a page for a particular key word.
When writing web page content it pays to reduce on the number of redundant words to increase the density of the chosen keywords that we are optimising for.
Images Search engines are only able to read text and are unable to analyse images on a web page. To allow search engines to “read” what an image is about it needs to have a description attached. This is called “Image alt tag” in web programming jargon and refers to the alternative text for the image.
Hyperlinks On many web pages there are portions of text that can be clicked in order to jump to other web pages. This text is usually highlighted and is known as “anchor tags” or “link text”. Search engines analyse the text used here and use the information to rank the web site.
Summary: Web page content
Headings, keyword prominence, proximity, density, hyperlink text and the importance of using “alt tags” for images to enter a text description: All of these have a part to play in getting to the top of the search engines for the keywords that are important to us.