Search Friendly Text

Search Friendly Text

Making the visible text on a page "search-friendly" isn't perplexed, but it is an issue that many sites struggle with. Text styles that won’t be indexed by search engines include:

• Text embedded in a Java Application or Macromedia Flash file
• Text in an image file - jpg, gif, png, etc
• Text approachable only via a form submit or other on-page action

If the search engines can't view your page's text, they cannot crawl and index that content for visitors to find. Thus, making search-friendly text in HTML format is decisive to ranking well and getting properly indexed. If you are pushed to use a format that conceals text from search engines, try to use the right keywords and phrases in headlines, title tags, URLs and image/file names on the page. Don't go overboard with this tactic, and never try to hide text (by making it the same color as the background or using CSS tricks). Even if the search engines can't detect this automatically, a rival can easily report your site for spamming and have you de-listed totally.

Along with making text visible, it's important to recall that search engines evaluate the terms and phrases in a document to extract a great deal of information about the page. Composing well for search engines is both an art and a science (as SEO are not privy to the exact, technical methodology of how search engines score text for rankings), and one that can be tackled to achieve better rankings.

In general, the following are basic rules that enforce to optimizing on-page text for search rankings:

• Make the main term/phrase outstanding in the document - Measurements like keyword density are useless (see kw density myth thread), but universal frequency can help rankings.

• Make the text on-topic and high quality - Search engines use advanced lexical analysis to help find quality pages, as well as teams of researchers placing common elements in high quality writing. Thus, great writing can supply gains to rankings, as well as visitors.

• Use an optimized document structure - The best practice is mostly to follow a journalistic format wherein the document starts with a description of the content, then flows from broad discussion of the subject to narrow. The gains of this are moot, but in increase to SEO value, they render the most readable and pursuing informational document. Evidently, in positions where this would be unfitting, it's not essential.

• Keep text together - Many folks in SEO recommend using CSS rather than table layouts in order to keep the text flow of the document together and prevention the breaking up of text via coding. This can also be achieved with tables - simply make sure that text sections (content, ads, navigation, etc.) flow together inside a single table or row and don't have too many "nested" tables that make for broken sentences and paragraphs.

Keep in mind that the text layout and keyword usage in a document no longer carries high importance in search engine rankings. While the right structure and usage can provide a slight boost, obsessing over keyword placement or layout will provide little overall benefit.