SEO By The Page – 10. General Page Content

General page content refers to everything that is in the body section of the HTML/XHTML document (web page) and typically includes everything that will appear on the visible portion of the web page as viewed in a web browser. Other articles will look at specific items like headings, images, and menus, that appear on the page but this article will look simply at the general nature of the content of any HTML/XHTML document as it relates to search engine optimization (SEO).

First, page content that gets indexed is, for the most part, just regular text. Graphics don't get indexed -- at least not in the same way. See the Image Tags and Attributds article in this series for more about this. Until recently Flash movies and other video content didn't get indexed at all. Now it only gets indexed in if certain special situations exist. For the most part, if you have a page that is one big .jpg graphic, or one big Flash movie, then your page will not be well indexed if at all.

Text needs to be clearly written in good, well-formatted, English. Yes, that matters! And it should be topical. Keeping each page to a single topic or, perhaps, a small number of related sub-topics is best. Well written, keyword rich, informative, text is the key to being indexed properly and getting good placement in search engine return pages (SERPs). The phrase content is king is ever so true. Your web page needs to have a good amount of topical content in text form to move to the top in search engine placement.

Sometimes pages just don't lend themselves to a lot of descriptive text. In that case you will need to bring together as many of the other various elements of SEO as possible. This may take more work but it can be done. The other articles in this series will help you.

Be sure to have correctly coded headings and sub-headings and, where possible, move your best, most descriptive, text as close to the top of the page as possible. Use good writing techniques like opening with a good, attention grabbing, paragraph that sumerizes the page, and then take the reader through the extended version. Tell us what you are going to tell us. Then tell us. Then tell us what you have told us. Think about that. It makes sense. And it works!

But, above all, write for the human readers who will visit your page. Search engine indexing takes this into account. It may seem strange but if you created your page entirely for search engines you actually won't rate as well. Write first and formost for your reader, not for the search engine spiders. That works too!