Content & SEO. What does that mean? ‘Content’ just means text, images, videos – anything that makes up the content of a web page or marketing campaign. SEO is an acronym (because this industry just loves its acronyms) for ‘Search Engine Optimisation’. It’s a fancy way of saying ‘getting pages written properly, so search engines (mostly Google) know what they’re about.
Content & SEO – the Backbone of Any Webpage
There’s a often heard mantra in the internet industry, “Content is king”. It’s absolutely true. ‘Content’ can refer to any number of creative elements, but for web pages, mostly refers to text, or ‘copy’. The text you display on your website has a huge impact on how the search engines see you and, more importantly, how they ‘rank’ your website in their listings.
When I put together a new website, I always ask clients to write as much as they can about their business. There are two reasons for this: a. you know your business a lot better than I do and b. your ‘voice’ is as distinctive as you are. I am happy to write copy for clients, but it will always have my ‘voice’. You business is far better represented by you, you know it and understand it far better than I ever will.
You may, as many clients often feel, think you’re not a writer. That may be true and I understand, but that’s where my 30+ years of experience & skill with copy writing and text construction come in. I take your original wording and edit it to fit a marketing need. I make it succinct and to make sure the search engines – notably Google – fully understand what you’re saying.
Content – The Text & Images on your Website
I understand, it can be difficult to write marketing text, especially about your own company. However, the chances are, you know a lot more about your company than you think you know and your knowledge is invaluable. The more information you can give me, the better I can represent you online.
Don’t Copy. Whatever you do, don’t copy the text or images from other websites. The internet knows, Google knows and it will down-rank your website, is it sees copied material. When I am asked to write new content for a website, I will look at similar or even competitive websites and take ideas from them. But those ideas are always written with fresh wording and in different ways.
Write, write and write some more. Google used to recommend that each web page contain a minimum of 300 words, but that was a few years ago and popular thinking now suggests a well-performing web page should contain a minimum of 1,000 words. Now, that’s a lot or words.
A project of mine, KerryLinen.ie, sell bedding and bed linen on an e-commerce website and has a number of kinds of white cotton sheets. It’s difficult enough to write 1,000 words about a simple white cotton sheet, but to write 6 lots of 1,000 words – all different, about practically identical products – is very tricky indeed.
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
As you can see on this page, sentences are short and, although I may ramble a little at times, to the point. You can also see a number of ‘headers’, those lines like the one above, “SEO – Search Engine Optimisation”. These headers are these headers are there for a good reason. HTML – the language of the internet – uses a set structure of up to six headers, called “H tags”. The first header on this page is “H1”, which is the main point of the page. This is the ‘keyword’ of the page.
Lower down the page is an ‘H2’ header, which duplicates the H1 but expands it a little, adding further information. Further again and we find some ‘H3’ headers, which are designed to be sub-topics of the main H1 header.
SEO also includes a set of texts which aren’t immediately visible on the page. Generally referred to ask ‘meta tags’, the two most prominent are the page title and description. If you’re reading this web page on a laptop or desktop computer, roll you mouse cursor over the tab in your browser and you’ll see a small ‘popup’ window containing the text, “Content & SEO. Perhaps the Most Important Part of your Website.”. That bit of text is one of the most important part of this web page. It gives Google an immediate idea of the content of the page.
There are a dozen or more important factors involved in getting the SEO right, from the caption under the photo at the top of this page to the number of times the phrase “Content & SEO” is mentioned, to certain words being bold or italicised. I won’t go into all the detail here, but just know that these tiny details will make a huge difference to the strength of your website.
Taxonomy
It’s the way we structure a website. How the pages are created in a hierarchy and how pages are grouped into categories. This bit is far-too-easily messed up and is so important for search engines to organise your website.
Taxonomy plays a crucial role in organizing and structuring content on a website, enhancing user experience, and improving search engine optimization (SEO). Here’s why it’s essential:
- Organization and Navigation: Taxonomy provides a logical and intuitive way to categorize content, making it easier for users to navigate and find relevant information. By grouping related content into hierarchical categories and subcategories, visitors can quickly locate what they’re looking for, leading to a more satisfying browsing experience.
- Content Discoverability: A well-designed taxonomy ensures that all content is appropriately tagged and classified, making it more discoverable to both users and search engines. Properly categorized content increases the likelihood of it being surfaced in search results and recommended to users based on their interests and browsing history.
- SEO Benefits: Search engines rely on taxonomy to understand the structure and relevance of a website’s content. By using consistent and descriptive taxonomy terms, website owners can improve their chances of ranking higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords. Additionally, a well-organized taxonomy can lead to the creation of clear and concise URLs, which further enhances SEO performance.
- Scalability and Maintenance: A robust taxonomy framework facilitates scalability and ease of maintenance as the website grows and evolves. It allows for the addition of new content and categories without disrupting the overall structure, ensuring that the website remains organized and user-friendly over time.
In summary, taxonomy serves as the backbone of a website, providing the foundation for effective organization, navigation, discoverability, and SEO. By investing time and effort into developing a well-thought-out taxonomy, website owners can create a more user-friendly and search engine-friendly online experience.
Your Content and the Strength of its SEO Form the Bedrock of your Online Presence
But it doesn’t just stop there. Once we have the foundations right, it’s time to start pushing people to your sparkling, brand new website!
- Online Advertising with Google Ads
- Social Media Marketing, Specifically Facebook
- Google ‘My Business’ (It’s not called that any more, but is still mostly referred to as.)
- Email Marketing Campaigns
I fell this page has ‘gone on’ a little, but the truth is, there’s quite a lot involved in getting a web page right. SEO and taxonomy aren’t easily describable in a few words, there’s a lot involved. They are, however, perhaps the most important part of any website build.
Clients, naturally, will tend to concentrate only on the ‘look’ or ‘design’ of a website, when the aesthetic appearance makes absolutely no difference to whether the website is paid attention to by search engines. Google won’t care that your website “looks good”, it will only see certain, very technical, aspects, including word count, visible text-to-code ratio, percentage of keyword density, use of keyword in headings, images and meta information. The list goes on.