Page Content and Website Content for SEO
Page content is the text and images that are on your website. Images are not as important as text since images cannot be indexed like text. It’s important to remember that the more text content you have on each page the greater your chances of getting found.
Note also that if you have really useful, interesting content on your pages then other sites are much more likely to link to yours. You should therefore create as much interesting content about your business, products and services as you possibly can. Incidentally this is the reason we produced this website, which is all about content.
So get writing! Put as much text content and useful information on your website as you possibly can. The more words you have on there the more chances you have of getting found.
Page Content SEO Elements
Keywords
You need to have the appropriate keywords you are targeting within the text content of each page. It is generally accepted that these keywords should appear at the start and the end of the text content on the page as well as in a few other places. There is always a lot of discussion about "keyword density", which is the proportion of keywords to the rest of the page text content. I tend to just trust my own judgement and strike a balance between including the keywords and ensuring that the text remains readable for my website visitors. Note that we still refer to keywords but targeting single words is no longer feasible so for keywords read keyphrases.
Actual Page Content
Content is King! The content on your page should be well written and offer useful, interesting information to the website visitor in the context of the page. If you cannot write well yourself consider hiring a copy writer. Google can tell when useful content is on the page so don’t fill your pages with rubbish.
Homepage
Your homepage is the most important page on your website so get lots of useful content on there. Do not make the mistake that a lot of people make in displaying a large logo and "click to enter" sign on your homepage. This can be very damaging from an SEO perspective. Don’t starve the search engines, feed them well. They like to eat words.
Geographical Targeting
If your business targets specific locations then ensure that you name these locations on the page to try to rank for search terms like "trade training Manchester". In our example this may mean adding some content on the page. We sometimes add this to the common footer area of websites so that it is included on all pages.
For example...
"The Caledan training school is located in central Manchester. We are therefore ideally located to serve clients in Manchester, Liverpool, Warrington, Stockport, Rochdale and also elsewhere in Lancashire, west Yorkshire and Cheshire."
Adding your full address to each page can also help with geographical targeting.
H1, H2, H3 Page Heading Elements
Another signal that Google uses to rank a page is the H1, H2, H3... page heading elements. This is a type of HTML formatting that is used to describe the heading hierarchy of the page. The page content should have an on page title described as follows <H1>Trade Training in Manchester</H1>. This would be followed by some text information then perhaps an H2 tag with a sub-heading, <H2>Plumbing Trade Training</h2>. Some more information about this could then be followed by <H3>Electrical Trade Training</H3>.
All of these would send another signal to Google that this page is about Trade Training. The H1, H2, H3... hierarchy goes down to H6 but in practice we seldom use anything below H3. If there were subsequent sub headings after H3 we would just continue to format these as H3.
Bolding and Italics
There is a school of thought that suggests that bolding of keywords and using italics affects ranking. If it does it will be in a very small way but it is worth considering.
Keywords in Filenames
Placing keywords in filenames also helps Google to determine what a page is about. If your website has already been built then there may not be much you can *do about this. For example it is fairly obvious without looking at the page that a page called www.caledantradetraining.com/plumberstraining.html is related to plumbing and trade training.
It is also important to note that hyperlinks to pages like this already include the keywords whether or not text links are used. Any links to this page will include the keywords "trade training" and "plumbers training" whether or not they are written as text links or just the URL. This is much better than www.caledantradetraining.com/page1.html for example.
*Note: Actually you can change your current website filenames without penalty using a .htaccess configuration file. This should only be attempted if you know what you are doing.
Alt Attributes
Alt attributes (alt=alternative) are used to describe the contents of an image. They are designed for automated screen readers used by visually impaired people who cannot see the images. Screen readers convert the text on a webpage to speech and when they encounter an image they use the alt attribute to describe it. We said earlier that text content is more important than images but the search engines do index image alt attributes so they may offer an optimisation opportunity.
Page Content SEO Elements - Actions Required Summary
- Write your website content in a way that uses the relevant keywords for each page. Don't overdo it by cramming too many keywords onto the page. This may work with regard to ranking but it will be a turn off for your website visitors. No one wants to read stuff like, "Trade training Manchester is what we do at our trade training centre where our skilled trade trainers do trade training for a wide variety of trades". You will have no doubt seen text like this on some other websites.
- Create as much interesting content as possible both for your visitors and for the search engines and also for "Link baiting" (the process of writing content that other websites may find interesting enough to create a link to it).
- Add new content or update your content as regularly as possible. The search engines like websites that are regularly updated.
- Make sure your keywords are towards the start of the first sentence on the page and that they also appear in the final sentence if possible.
- Use variations on the main keywords. Google is becoming very good at spotting related phrases and putting them in context, "trade training", "plumbers trade training", "electrical trade training", "training for tradesmen", etc.
- Use your keywords in filenames where possible. (This may not be possible if your website has already been built.)
- Use the Page Heading Elements appropriately. Bear in mind that only one H1 should be used on each page and that this should be at or near the top. The other elements can be used more than once if required. Your document text and heading element hierarchy should look something like this...
<H1> Trade Training in Manchester</H1>
<p>This should be followed by a paragraph or two of text related to the H1. This is the most important heading element.</p>
<H2>Plumbing Trade Training</H2>
<p>This should be followed by a paragraph or two of text related to the H2. This is the next most important heading element</p>
<H3>Electrical Trade Training</H3>
<p>This should be followed by a paragraph or two of text related to the H3. This is the next most important heading element.</p> - Consider the use of bolding and/or italics on some of your keywords.
- Ensure that alt attributes are used appropriately to describe images on your website.
- Consider linking to a few other appropriate websites, particularly authority websites. Google may take this as a sign of quality.
- Ensure that there is a "call to action" on your pages. There is no point in gaining a good position in the SERPs if people click through to your pages and see nothing that interests them there. This is a problem that is more common than you may think. Lots of people concentrate only on attracting traffic forgetting that they have to convert this to sales or enquiries after people actually arrive on their web pages.
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