Is Website Text Content That Important?
Website & Business Promotion; Ethical SEO; & Site Maintenance.
Writing Website Content.
Writing enough good quality, relevant web page content often creates problems for the smaller business or self-employed website owner. First, you need someone to do it!
If not you - then who?!?
And then you want to know that what is written is of benefit for both attracting visitors, and for informing those who do come about your product or service!
As part of the on-page website optimisation service I provide, a large part of my time is spent writing, amending, and editing web page text.
I like to work closely with the website owner or manager to ensure that what we agree looks and sounds right, and fits with the business or trade they are in. I am regularly given some base text, and then asked to 'sharpen it up', or I get asked to 'put something together' and we then bounce it backwards and forwards until we are happy that it is about right.
Quite often we identify that the page content that is presently in place can be improved, and again, editing and amending it tends to be a collaborative effort.
If you are not sure how well your website is performing please ask for an SEO review.
It is said that enough relevant good quality text is important.
Getting The Text Content Right For Your Site.
If you are keen to improve the performance of your web pages, one of the common statements you will find in books, articles and on the web, is that "Content Is King". To a large extent this is true, however, before you spend hours researching what this means, and looking for the best approaches for producing it, I would ask you to step back and ask yourself a few questions about the status and intended audience of your site.
To put this approach into perspective you need to understand that there are tens of thousands of websites which are very successful and serving their masters well where content is quite definitely not king. These range from the sites of multi-national and global organisations right down to your local tradesman, shop or designer!! And quite often, on these well-viewed sites there is little or no text content, in fact in some cases the content consists purely of images.
The qualifying words that need the go with the 'content is king' statement are 'if you want to get your site seen by the search engines'.
Now we are talking business!!
As I have mentioned elsewhere in these pages, there are numerous good things that can be done within your pages to help the search engines 'like' your site. In the vast majority of cases, even though some things are considered more important that others, no one approach, feature or element will guarantee "Page-One" utopia!! However, including enough good quality, relevant text content in your key pages is of major importance to improve your search engine listing status!
So what is 'good quality'? It is straightforward html text - no fancy-pants java or flash which the search engines cannot read. How much is enough text? There is some dispute as to exactly what 'enough' is but my understanding is that 100-plus words is good, 200-plus is better.
'Relevant'. This comes back to tying in the word content with what you say the page is about so that the various text elements within the page all say broadly the same thing - they are all "singing off the same hymn sheet". I must warn you that 'relevance' is not easy. It takes time, and from my experience, you need to really nail down the key subject, or purpose of the page first. Otherwise you can waste a great deal of time.
Staying with experience for a moment, I have tended to find that where there is existing text content in a page I am being asked to improve the search engine performance for - amongst other things - it is almost always a 'relevance' misfit that I have to work on with the site manager.
So, if you are looking to improve the search engine listing status of a page, or pages on your site, or you are seeking to get more search engine visitor response, take another look at the amount, quality and relevance of the text content within your pages. If they are wanting, treat it as urgent to improve them. If you are struggling with it, or just don't know where to start please feel free to contact me and we can work on putting things right.
To email me: Click Here to email Neil.