Here’s some text.

This is bold text.

Italic.

THIS (APPARENTLY) MEANS I’M SUPER SERIOUS ABOUT WHAT I’M SAYING.

One thing is for sure, the text on your website is of the utmost importance in your quest to build up a site’s authority. The actual words that you use on a given page needs to be optimized for two things: users and search engines. If you don’t take both into consideration, you may be wasting a lot of time and money in your content efforts.

Let’s dive in.

Optimize Text for Humans

Sometimes digital marketers forget the most important factor of building out a webpage, which is the human communication involved. The reason you built it is to convey something to a specific audience, right? If not, you may want to reconsider your tactics.

Everything about the text of your site should exude a deliberate tone, whether it’s informative, humorous, or persuasive. Putting world education standards aside, most people can tell pretty quickly if the writer is competent-- and whether or not they should spend any more time on the site.

Do they keep reading, or hit the “back” button?

These types of user signals are becoming increasingly important to search results, so if you haven’t already done so, invest in quality content.

Another important aspect of tone is the point of view from which you address the audience. In most blog posts, using “I”, and “you” tends to add a more personal touch. You are communicating directly with the reader at this point, which means you can evoke emotions within them of trust, sadness, excitement, etc. Another choice you’ll have to make is whether to, you know... ummm, write the way you talk… or write with an informative and professional voice. All of these factors show users a myriad of things about you, which affects how they interact with the site- and more importantly, how it affects your site!

Use the same tone and point of view throughout the piece, and don’t forget to carry it over to your meta description as well, that way users get the expected experience from clicking on a search result.

Use Headers

See what I did there?

Using strategic H1’s, H2’s, on so on, have more than one purpose. Yes, they do make the text larger and smaller, but more importantly for human interaction, it makes your content “skimmable”. They can break up the content and see the various parts, making it easier to jump to different sections that they deem more relevant to them.

In addition, headers are crawled by search engines and do have an affect on rankings. Best practices dictate using just one H1 per page. Avoid always using blatant “ranking” keywords as your H1 that don’t make sense to a user. For example, you may want to rank for “plumber houston tx”, but using this exact phrase as an H1 could be weird for users, and Google may crack down on these in the future.

Optimize for Search Engines

Once you’ve identified the type, tone, and purpose of your content, it’s time to make sure that search engines are getting a good experience as well. Major advancements have taken place in the technology and potential of search engines, but let’s not pretend they’re infallible. For example, their guidelines strictly call out certain tactics, but we’re still seeing A LOT of sites blatantly using them to rank high in SERPs. Let’s just say it’s an ongoing process.

One ongoing process you should have in place is a way to make sure your text and code are easily readable by search engines. There are a few different ways to do this, but let’s make sure we understand exactly what is taking place.

Crawling

From Google’s own colorful lips: “We use software known as web crawlers to discover publicly available webpages. Crawlers look at webpages and… go from link to link and bring data about those webpages back to Google’s servers.”

This is the most basic definition, but the first thing you need to ensure is that these crawlers can actually access your site. You can check this information in Google Search Console or by looking at the “robots.txt” file. Once a search engine has permission to crawl a site, they can gather signals, text, links, and media to add to their index.

Make it Easier

To make sure search engines can crawl all of your pages quickly, make sure your site architecture is optimized properly. Point links to the new pages so that the spiders can get to it and eat it up. Any pages that are on an island (not linked to) may not be indexed for a long time, if at all.

Things to Avoid

Search engines have had a hard time reading Flash in the past, so it’s not recommended to build your whole website in Flash. Though they’ve claimed to have gotten better, it’s still a good idea to save yourself the potential headache. This same concept applies to AJAX as well. Recently Google has come out and said that they are able to better understand JavaScript, but to be on the safe side, make sure your important links are in simple HTML.

Another thing to keep in mind, though not overtly dangerous, is what is known as “code bloat”, or having lots of unneeded code on a given page. Search Engines are fairly adept at getting to the meat of the page or post, but if your site is on a larger scale with thousands of pages, I would implement clean code methods to reduce load time and the chance of Google seeing it as a problem.

Details, Details, Details

Long-form content has become the new norm for blog posts in certain industries. The advantages of writing in this way are many. First off, users will be on your site longer and most likely get the information that they need from it. These signals build on themselves to promote that page in Google’s eyes and make it easier to rank. These posts are also great for attracting backlinks- just try building links to a page with less than 300 words!

From a search engine perspective, these longer posts with 1000+ words naturally dive into a lot of detail, which means lots of LSI keywords. Look at it this way: it’s much easier to decipher that a page is about “training dogs” when you’re also mentioning the words sit and stay, canines, kennels, fetch, paws, behavioral problems, wagging tails, fido, etc. It doesn’t take long for search engines to have a clear idea of what the page is about.

Conclusion

Optimizing the text on your site is more than just making sure it’s easy to digest for search engines. Keep your tone, style, and overall pitch even throughout the piece and you’ll find that by and large, how humans react to your content is much more important than how robots do.