It’s very important for any webmaster to consider the effect of texts on search engine optimization. I won’t clog this article up with various links to research done on the topic as I’m sure you can use Google yourself to find them, but I will cover a few important things to remember when it comes to writing for websites. I think a large misconception in the world of SEO is keyword density – everyone thinks that they have the secret formula to how many keywords should be on a page but if I’m honest, I think these people are acting on nothing but pure superstition and I’ll explain why.
In 2009, Google made a profit of 6.5 billion dollars, they receive around 1 billion search queries a day, have over 450,000 servers across the globe and have the number one visited website on the net. If you think that this company doesn’t understand every trick in the book to get SERPs then my friend, you really do need to come back down to Earth. Google wants users to be able to find pages that are directly related to their search query – if SEO was all about keyword density and there was some magic formula to getting number one, why do the most relevant results seem to always come up on top? It’s simple to understand why – Google knows exactly what to look for.
Now don’t take this the wrong way, keyword density in a piece of text isn’t completely useless. If you’re trying to market a site that sells shoes you’d be silly to use the term ‘shoes’ at less than 1% density. I’m not disputing the power of keywords, but I do understand that Google only needs to have a rough idea of what your text is about to actually rank you for a term. The reality of text and its effect on SEO is actually largely due to the anchor text used for link juice – this is really where you push keywords and coin phrases for your site, the text on the page you’re linking to should be there to interest the reader and help Google understand the overall theme of your website.
One final thing to consider when writing for SEO is the implication of backlinks you would receive if the text you created was amazing. What’s better, 100 articles at 500 words that aren’t linked to, or 1 article at 1,000 words that has a wealth of link juice pointed at it with a plethora of relevant anchor texts? If this concept is hard for you to understand, I recommend you take some time out to truly grasp what true SEO is all about and educate yourself on how search engines such as Google work. Above all, I think it’s imperative for a webmaster to understand the real reason for text creation with respect to optimizing your site. Tip: it isn’t to shove thousands of keywords down Google’s throat.
