Entermotion Design Studio – Wichita, KS

Did you know Google’s algorithm uses more than 200 elements to determine a site’s ranking? That’s 200 things that could improve (or hurt!) your search engine results page standings. You don’t have time to go through each and every one of them, so we thought we’d break it down and hit on an easy one. Let’s kick off with how you can optimize website content.

When Google crawls your website, it’s trying to determine what the site is about. The bots check each page for relevance, making sure the content matches the overall purpose. The more closely related the two are, the more positively Google will view your site. Here are three ways you can tweak your content to help you stay on Google’s good side.

Bold and Italic Content

A lot of people don’t know this, but if you place text in either bold or italics, Google pays special attention to it. Now, we are not recommending you put your entire site’s content in bold and italics, but an important keyword or phrase will earn slightly higher emphasis. This will help your keywords stand out, therefore improving the overall relevance of your site. It might be low on the algorithm totem pole, but it’s there and we don’t think it should be overlooked.

Keyword Saturation

Using keywords in your content helps prove your site is actually talking about what it claims it’s talking about. We strongly believe there’s a fine line when it comes to using keywords to optimize website content, though. Your goal should be to use the keyword tactfully without sounding like a robot. Remember, your customers are human! The number of times you use it will depend on the length of your content, but the idea is to interlace the keyword(s) in eloquently by replacing “it” with your keyword. If you do it right, your content will be even more clear when all’s said and done.

Page Titles

Many people think the page title is just for convenience (after all, it tells you what’s on the page, right?) but it’s actually so much more than that. It’s the most important piece of meta data – the identifier used by search engines to determine the relevance of the content on that particular page. Set your page titles, but more importantly, name your pages according to what’s actually on them.

Bonus Tip – Don’t Forget About Live Text.

Did you know PDF documents are also crawled by search engines? It’s still better to put content directly on the webpage, but don’t count out your PDFs. If it’s text-based, Google will crawl it. So it’s never detrimental to upload PDFs for more information on a topic. It’s like you’ll optimize website content from behind the scenes!