Why is Text Important on a Web Page? It’s the information Google has to see the pages on your website. As of April 2024, most SEO experts recommend a minimum of 1,000 words per page. A thousand! It’s quite a lot and can become an overwhelming amount on larger sites.
Why is Text Important on a Web Page?
There are three ‘entities’ that will visit your website:
- Real People. You and I.
- Google. Or other Search Engines, but Google is, pretty much, all there is.
- Bots. Expect a lot.
Websites (and their owners) often try to rely on photographs or images to get the point across. It’s true, “a picture paints a thousand words”, but only to people, not to Google. Google (and other search engines) will see that there is an image, but not what the image is. Search engines can only reply on text content to determine the point of the page.
That said, too much text can be a turn-off for web visitors. However, there are a number of way to hide text from human visitors, while allowing Google to still read the contents of a page. This leaves the appearance of a clean, tidy page, but still
More text, better SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).
Let me put it this way… your site looks lovely, but if nobody’s finding you, its loveliness is never seen.
Text for Good SEO
Text is essential for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) on a web page for several reasons:
1. Content Indexing. Search engines rely on text to understand the content and context of a web page. Textual content provides search engines with valuable information about the topic, relevance, and purpose of the page, allowing them to index and rank it appropriately in search results.
2. Keywords and Relevance. Textual content includes keywords and phrases that users might use when searching for information related to the web page’s topic. By incorporating relevant keywords naturally into the text, website owners can signal to search engines that the page is relevant to specific search queries, improving its chances of appearing in relevant search results.
3. User Experience. High-quality, informative text enhances the user experience by providing valuable information and answering users’ questions. Search engines prioritize web pages that offer valuable and relevant content to users, so well-written text can improve user engagement metrics like time on page, bounce rate, and conversion rate, which indirectly contribute to SEO performance.
4. Link Building. Textual content can attract inbound links from other websites, blogs, and social media platforms. High-quality content that provides valuable information or solves users’ problems is more likely to be shared and linked to by others, which can improve the website’s authority, credibility, and visibility in search results.
5. Rich Snippets and Featured Snippets. Textual content can be used to create rich snippets and featured snippets in search results, providing users with quick answers to their queries and increasing the visibility and click-through rate of the web page.
In summary, text is crucial for SEO because it enables content indexing, incorporates relevant keywords, enhances user experience, attracts inbound links, and facilitates the creation of rich and featured snippets in search results, all of which contribute to improved search engine visibility and rankings.