Beginning to write

When writing your web content, it’s best to use simple, everyday language that people are likely to understand and possibly search for. As a general rule, we recommend including a keyword or keyword phrase often enough to be prominent so that someone who reads the page will be able to pick out what the most important word is. Don’t force your keywords into your content. Let it sound natural.

Additionally, you should avoid using only general phrases; be sure to include detailed descriptive words as well. If your keywords are too general, they are likely to be up against too much competition from others targeting the same keywords. However, fewer people search for very specific terms, resulting in fewer potential visitors. It’s a balancing act, and the rules aren’t hard and fast. You need to find the right mix for your site by finding the keywords that bring traffic that actually converts: In other words, you want to put out the bait that brings in the right catch. Also keep in mind that the broader keywords go on the upper landing pages and more specific keywords go on the subpages, so you might need to focus on several more specific variations of a keyword phrase to rank for the broader term. For example, targeting a general keyword phrase like “used cars” could have supporting long-tail keyword variations such as “used cars in New York City” and “used 2014 Mustangs” and more.

When you start to write a new page, stay focused on the page’s theme. Write as much as you can about that subject theme, even if the information seems totally obvious to you. What seems obvious to you probably would be new information to someone unfamiliar with your subject. After all, that’s why someone would come to your site: to read what a subject expert has to say. Begin by stating the obvious; it establishes your credibility when your visitors find information they already know to be true on your pages, and they'll be more likely to trust your site to give them further information.

As you write your first draft, don’t worry so much about keyword placement. Do include your keywords, but let the language flow naturally around the topic. Later you can analyze what you’ve written and refine things like keyword density and distribution (more on that under “Optimizing the Content,” later in this chapter).

To test whether your writing comes across as natural, try reading it out loud. Text that sounds like conversational language engages readers.

Keeping it relevant

Make sure that you don’t dilute the subject theme by including irrelevant information. Some pruning might be necessary if you’re working on an existing page rather than starting one from scratch. If the page is all about Chevrolet Camaros, keep the discussion focused on that car model, without a lengthy discussion of how it compared to the competing Pontiac Firebird back in the 1970s. Too many mentions of another type of car can dilute your Camaro theme and confuse the search engines, thereby reducing your subject relevance to [Chevrolet Camaros].

Including clarifying words

You want to include secondary words that help clarify what your keywords are about. For example, if you have the keyword [apple] for one of your pages, the search engines are going to look at all the text near the word apple to figure out whether your page is about the fruit or the technology company. If this was your web page, you could use words like software, iPad, or other related terms to clarify that you mean Apple as in tech company.

You want to put your clarifying words close to your keywords in the text. The closer the proximity, the stronger the correlation.

Another reason to include clarifying words is to match more search queries, especially long-tail queries. Long-tail queries are longer, targeted search phrases that aren’t frequently used, but they generally have a high conversion rate because searchers entering these queries know exactly what they’re looking for. Search engine users are becoming savvier as time goes on, and they know that a single keyword is probably going to be too broad. A good example is what happens when you do a search for [security]. You might be in need of a security guard service, but doing a quick search on Google with the keyword [security] gives you the Wikipedia article on security, the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration, and many listings for computer security software. Using a long-tail search query like [security guard service Poughkeepsie], on the other hand, turns up map results listing local businesses, two local business sites for hiring security guards, and a couple of news articles about security services in Poughkeepsie.

You can see why it’s a good idea to include supplemental words and phrases on your web pages. Search engines can match queries to words that can be found in proximity to each other on your page, even if they never appear as a phrase. So for instance, if your web page has the heading “Oldsmobile 98s Make the Coolest Convertibles,” and the body copy contains all these words in close proximity as well, your page would be found relevant to the search query [Oldsmobile 98 convertible], even though you never used the exact phrase.

Including synonyms to widen your appeal

Synonyms of your keywords also need to show up on your web pages, in your HTML tags, and in the anchor text of links to your pages. People don’t use the exact same words to describe things, so it appears more natural to search engines to find backlinks to your pages using a variety of different terms that all mean roughly the same thing.

Including keyword synonyms also helps you match more search queries. People search for things in their own words, not yours. For instance, if you have a page on your classic cars site all about Oldsmobile 98s, you should make sure your keywords include both [Ninety-Eight] spelled out and the numeric [98], because people could search either way. In another example, a web page that sells ski boots would optimize that page for the keyword phrase [ski boots]. But they’d also want their listing to display when people search for [ski footwear], [snow boots], or [winter apparel]. Unless they have synonyms like these within the page, the search engine won’t find it relevant and won’t include it in the search results.

Also, don’t forget nicknames! If your main subjects have common nicknames, these are important to include — possibly as keywords, but at least in your body content. For instance, on your classic cars site, your Chevrolet Camaro page should include the word [Chevy], your Ford Mustang page should include the nickname [Stang], and so forth.

Of course, your hunt for good synonyms could begin in a thesaurus. Even better, find out what words Google thinks are synonymous with your keywords. Do this by searching for a keyword and then noticing the other words that Google formats in bold on the results page besides the words you typed.

Dealing with stop words

Stop words are small, common like a, the, at, to, will, this, and, with and others. Because they typically add little meaning to a query, the search engines used to ignore them almost entirely. Today, however, search engine algorithms are intelligent enough to recognize phrases that contain stop words, rather than discard them completely. For example, a search for [holiday on ice], which is the name of a touring ice show, brings back entirely different results from a search for [holiday ice], even though the preposition “on” is a stop word. Further, queries that are made up completely of stop words, such as [The Who], can be understood and processed as is. In today’s world, in which search engines increasingly understand the semantics of spoken or written language, you can feel free to include stop words in your keyword phrases as appropriate.

Freshness of the content

Content freshness can affect a web page’s rankings, depending on the topic. Google likes to show current information, especially for queries on trends, celebrities, technology, and other quickly evolving subjects. With our Bruce Clay, Inc. blog, we have noticed that posts about competitive keywords show up higher in Google search results when they are newer and decline in ranking over time. We have a few notable exceptions, but overall, newer blog posts have a ranking advantage over older ones, all else being equal.

Another benefit is that the more often your site has fresh content, the more often the search engines want to index it. News sites, for example, have to be crawled constantly because of how frequently they post new stories. On a lesser scale, if you have a blog on your website that has new activity every day, the spiders crawl your site more often than a site that updates once a month.

If your site content gets indexed in news searches, you definitely need fresh content to stay near the top. Without frequent posts, news articles may fade into the oblivion of the search results’ back pages. For a blog, you want to post often enough to merit frequent return visits from readers as well as spiders. Set your posting schedule based on your own and your target audience’s needs, but try to make fresh, original content available on a regular basis.

Your site’s ranking in normal search results does not change based on how frequently the search engine spiders crawl your site. Where you might suffer as a result of infrequent search engine indexing, however, is if you’ve made SEO-related changes to your site since the last time the search engine spiders crawled the site, and those changes have not yet been indexed. If that’s the case, you can bring them to the search engine’s attention by manually submitting the changed page URLs. See Book VII, Chapter 6 to learn about direct submission.

Periodically, you should review your site content to make sure it stays fresh. See if anything has changed, and either update or add to the text that’s there. This is pretty much common sense, but it has the added benefit of providing fresh content to keep the spiders coming back to your site.

Deepening your content

The engines look for depth and breadth of content on a subject to confirm that a web page really knows what it’s talking about and deserves to be a search result. This is even more true since the birth of Google’s Knowledge Graph, which seeks to understand not just the meaning of words but also the connections between entities on the web (see Book I, Chapter 3).

When you include supplemental words and phrases beyond your keywords, you help search engines map your web page content to their Knowledge Graph data. They increasingly understand the relationships between various people, places and things (that is, entities). So when they index a web page about a subject, they expect to find words that relate to it. For example, a page about John Wayne would be expected to include supplemental words like “actor,” “western” and “movies”; a page lacking these semantically connected words probably wouldn’t be considered much of an expert on the subject of John Wayne. In order to be found most relevant to searches for your subjects, consider increasing your pages’ depth of content.

Dynamically adding content to a page

You may use a Content Management System (CMS) that takes your content and automatically builds your web pages from it. If so, you’ll want to make sure it’s dynamically adding content properly, taking into consideration everything you know about SEO and good content writing. For instance, the text should sound natural, use your keywords in the appropriate amount and distribution, and make sense. Also, make sure that the Title and Meta tags in the page’s Head section are being created properly, emphasizing appropriate keywords, with every page unique.

You don’t want to ever lose control of your website by using a poor-quality CMS that is not configurable. Because search engines decide whether your pages are relevant for search queries based on having keyword-rich, focused content and unique headings and tags, you can’t afford to let an inflexible CMS limit how much you can customize each page.

Another thing to avoid is auto-generated text. Generally, machine-written content sounds unnatural and won’t do a good job representing you either to users or to the search engines. (For more discussion of content management systems, see Book VII, Chapter 5.)

Setting up the HTML

Looking at your page in the HTML code view, your first step is to do what we call “getting the red out.” (In the Single Page Analyzer tool, things that need to be corrected are displayed in red text, so it's easy to figure out where to start.) You want to fix the blatant SEO issues, the ones that are the most obvious and often the easiest to fix. Here’s what to look for:

• Title tag: The Title tag should appear at the top of your HTML code’s Head section. It should be unique and contain your page’s main keyword (with no word repeated). Normally the Title tag should be between 6 and 12 words in length (brief).
• Meta description tag: The Meta description tag should appear after the Title tag in your HTML Head section. It needs to contain all the keywords used in the Title tag, and it should be written like a sentence because this is often what search engines display within a result listing. Any word should not appear more than twice. The length guideline is 12 to 24 words.
• Meta keywords tag: The Meta keywords tag should appear after the Meta description tag in your HTML Head section and should contain all the words used in the Title and Description tags. It can be written as a list separated by commas, starting with the long phrases and ending with single words. No single word should be used more than four times, and the total length should not exceed 48 words.

• Heading tags: Heading tags (H# tags) set apart your on-page titles and subheadings, and search engines analyze them to determine your page’s main ideas, so make them meaningful. You want to use an H1 for the first and most important heading on the page only. Second-level headings should be given H2, third-level headings H3, and so forth; also, they should never be placed out of order. Just think back to school term papers, outlines … . When the search engines were built, their main purpose was to index educational, technical, and professional papers, and very little else. The engines still rely on the same basic information architecture that they started out with.

  A good heading length is from one to five words, but how many headings you should have on a page depends on the content. Only use an H# tag when it defines a change in the content structure, much like a table of contents outlines the structure of a book. You will almost never have multiple H1 tags (not many pages have more than one main topic, after all), but you could have multiple H2, H3, and so on, if the content supports it.

  For example:

  <h1>Ford Reviews</h1>Content about Ford Reviews (200 words)<h2>Mustang Reviews</h2>Content about Ford Mustang Reviews (200+ words)<h2>F-150 Reviews</h2>Content about Ford F-150 reviews (200+ words again)

• In the preceding example, the H1 and H2 tags are used properly. Think about it as a school or technical paper. It has to follow an outline format completely. You can have an H3 heading, but only if it's below an H2 tag. If you had a section for the engine specs of the Ford Mustang, for example, that could be considered an H3.

  The usage of H4 and H5 tags would have to be, again, related sub-content to the H3 tag, and so on.

Digging deeper by running Single Page Analyzer

After you have your document all cleaned up, and the Single Page Analyzer tool doesn’t report any more red items to edit, you can work on optimizing the body content you wrote. We suggest you run the page through the Single Page Analyzer by following these steps:

1. Go to www.seotoolset.com/tools/free-tools/.
2. Locate the Single Page Analyzer on this page and enter the page’s URL (such as www.yourdomain.com/pageinprogress.html) in the Page URL text box.
3. Click the Run Page Analyzer button and wait until the report appears.

The Single Page Analyzer report compiles lots of useful information for you to analyze your page content and plan improvements, as we explain in a moment. We suggest you look at the following six areas to diagnose issues and improve your page: the Heading section, frequently used words, reading level, keyword density, keyword frequency, and keyword distribution.

• Head section problems: You can see at a glance if you’ve overlooked any of the problems that need fixing; the report shows exceptions in bright red text. For instance, if you used a word in your Meta description tag but forgot to include it in the Meta keywords tag as well, under the Meta keywords tag heading, you would see this message:

  META Keywords is MISSING a word that is in either the TITLE or META Description.

• Frequently used words: Figure 3-1 shows a portion of tables from the report listing one-word and two-word phrases that are used at least twice in the page.

  Looking across the rows, you can also see what section of the page each phrase appears in, whether it's in the title, description, keywords, headings, image Alt codes, or something else. Because search engines look for repeated words to ascertain what your page is all about, look carefully at these tables. The most frequently used words appear at the top: These should be your keywords. You also want to make sure you don’t have frequently repeated words that might distract the search engines from understanding your main page theme. You can see how this report can save you hours of manual work counting instances and trying to make sure your keywords, synonyms, clarifying words, and so on are adequately used.

• Reading level: In the Text Metrics section, the report shows you details about your text’s reading level. Because you want your site to be appropriate for your target audience, this is important. The row (not shown in the figure) labeled “Kincaid Grade Level” identifies the U.S. school grade level that your writing matches. If it says 16.0, that means your text is appropriate for someone with four years of college education. The Kincaid score is based on the average number of syllables per word and words per sentence. If you find your pages scoring way too high or too low for your target audience’s education level, you should adjust your word length and sentence structure. For instance, a website directed at tweens needs to have a low Kincaid score (around 5.0 to 8.0), but that reading level would not be appropriate for a site targeting doctoral candidates.

  You can also check your document’s Flesch-Kincaid score and Flesch grade level in Microsoft Word. Check out Chapter 2 in this minibook for instructions on how to turn on your readability statistics in Word.

• Keyword frequency: Because the use of keywords is so crucial to your search engine optimization, examine your keyword frequency (the number of times the keyword appears on the page). This number shows in the All Words column of the Single Page Analyzer report. And as with keyword density, you need to size up your competitors to find out what number to shoot for.
• Keyword distribution: One last measurement that affects your search engine ranking for a particular keyword is the distribution, or placement throughout the page. Your site might use the keyword phrase [classic cars] the right number of times (frequency) and in the right proportion to the total amount of text (density), but it also needs to distribute the phrase regularly throughout the page. If you use it only in the top quarter of the page, the search engines assume that your page, as a whole, isn’t as relevant to classic cars as it would be if the phrase appears throughout the copy evenly.

You can find out the typical keyword usage for your competition by running the Single Page Analyzer on your competition’s web pages. You can also subscribe to tools that produce this comparison data in one step, such as the Multi Page Analyzer from the SEOToolSet Pro tools suite, which you find at www.seotoolset.com. (For more help doing competitive research, see Book III. Detailed instructions on how to approximate the results of the Multi Page Analyzer are available in Book III, Chapter 2.)