Day 3 – How To Optimize Your Body Text
April 30th, 2009 | by Court | Published in SEO | 11 CommentsThis post is part of my 30 Days To Better SEO series.
Before we can talk about how to optimize the body text of the page you’re working on, we should probably define what body text is. To put it simply, body text is the text that you can see on a web page. Everything you can see on this post would be considered to be body text.
The technical explanation of what body text is would be everything that appears between the opening body tag, <body>, and the closing body tag, </body>, in the code for the page.
Bloggers don’t really need to worry about the technical explanation – you can think of body text as a combination of your post title and the main body of your post, or as the text that appears on your blog’s homepage.
Optimizing Body Text
Step one of optimizing your body text is making sure that the keyword appears as text on the web page. If it isn’t there, you’ll have a weaker relevancy score and that means you’re going to need extra links to outrank the competition. We don’t want that because it’s obviously easier to add the keyword in as text than it is to get extra links.
If you’re working with a post page (or sub-page on a static site), you should use the keyword as the title of the post (or as a heading at the top of a static sub-page).
If you’re working with your home page, you should just make sure that it appears somewhere on the page. You can definitely still use your keyword as a title or heading on the page, but I understand that in some cases this won’t work for functional reasons.
Lately I’ve noticed that Google’s filter for over-optimization is a lot stronger than it used to be. I remember when you could use your keyword in the HTML title, H1 tag, Alt tags, bolded in the text, 10 times on the page, and in tags/labels. That has changed and over-optimization is a lot more prevalent than it used to be.
Basically what Google is telling us with this filter is that there’s no need to use the keyword 57 times on the page and in every type of secret tag known to man. If you use the keyword in the title of the post (or heading) and once or twice in the body of the post (or page), you’re good to go. I usually also use the keyword as a tag/label – that makes sense from a functionality standpoint and Google understands this.
Step two of optimizing your body text is making sure that you cover topics that are related to your keyword. This will increase your relevancy score with Google. That means if your keyword is ‘cars’, you should talk about Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, Honda, GM, Saturn, Mercury, Lexus, BMW, and a bunch of other types of cars. Wikipedia does a great job of this, relative to other sites, and this increases their relevancy scores with Google and also makes their pages easier to link to.
Most people leave out this step entirely and honestly it’s a big reason why people don’t do as well as they would like to. If people would just take a little extra time to add more information they would gather more natural links and would have better relevancy scores for their content.
Step three is linking to pages that are related to your keyword. If Google knows that you’re passing your visitors on to additional, related information, it will really help out. Why? Because it’s Google’s job to answers people’s questions and to solve their problems. I personally would do everything I could to make sure that the places you’re linking to are also on your site, as opposed to their being on someone else’s. That makes your overall site look more relevant to your keyword.
The Big Picture
Don’t fall into the trap of over-complicating this. If you’ve followed these three steps, you’re good to go.
I’m going to be working on #2 – I recently realized that the keyword that has the best traffic and CPM in my niche is rarely on my homepage because of blog post rotation. So I’m going to be switching to a static homepage so that I can get the keyword on there permanently.
Does the over-optimization apply to keywords as well. I recently changed the HTML tag for my post pages from “Post Name – Blog Name” to “Post Name – Descriptive phrase with two keywords” so that the main keywords that I’m targeting would be on every page of my site. Is that too much?
Mary that probably will be seen as over optimization. Again, it’s one of those things that used to help but Google is trying to nudge people away from it. I wouldn’t recommend it. Nice site by BTW!
I meant step one. New baby = little sleep = incoherent thoughts =)
Hi Court!
Thanks for the posts. I had a question about the last step – linking to pages that are related to your keyword. I read somewhere that if you link to highly relevant sites related to your keyword, Google will think your site is more relevant, even if those sites don’t like back to you.
Is that true? or should I just focus on linking to my internal pages?
Also, can you tell me your answer to the first question by Mary Frances?
That’s a case of people that have more established sites than you trying to get you to link to them. Think about this – if I said that here more people would like to me right? That’s why these guys are telling you to do it.
I would focus on creating additional resources for your own site and then linking to those. If there’s a really great resource that your readers can benefit from, link to it, but do it for the reader, not because you hope it will help you with Google.
I have a question on internal linking. I have most of my secondary pages link to my homepage, all uses my main keyword. Will this help on my ranking or will i get slap for over optimization?
Thank for the great posts.
You know Skylar it’s probably a little too much. It can provide a benefit, especially if scrapers post your content (and your links).
Here’s a little truth that not that many people know. Google only counts the first link from any page to another page. So, in the case of your site if I went to a post, the first link that pointed back to your homepage would be the Ways To Earn Extra Cash From Home link in the header. The second link to the home page would be the ‘home’ link in the nav bar. That means that the link back to your post is the third link pointing to your home page on any given post page. Google only counts the first one so it’s not doing anything for you.
You can still get a benefit if other people are posting your stuff – I just wouldn’t do it every post because it feels a little spammy. That said, I used to do it a lot.
How do we avoid having our keyword appear too often on the page if we are targeting a number of long tailed keywords plus the main keyword? If we are targeting 5-10 long tailed keywords that contain the main keyword then the KW will appear a lot more than once or twice on the page.
“Lately I’ve noticed that Google’s filter for over-optimization is a lot stronger than it used to be.”
I recently fell foul of this. I had a bunch of top spots that got dumped way back to page 3 (bye bye traffic and money) – I figured that the relentless optimization might be the issue so toned it all down and a week later normal service was restored.
My experience also supports your premise that plentiful, relevant, informative content with a few well-balanced backlinks tends these days to win out over hasty, keyword-stuffed fluff even when the fluff has more backlinks.
Until recently the better (over) optimized fluff would invariably win, but no more it seems. I view this as a positive move since creating good content, is arguably a lot easier than gathering quality links. Also, Google are never going to stop trying to reward good content over smart SEO.
Google have consistently made it plain what they want their search engine to deliver – quality information that best answers any given query. Their algorithms are constantly changed in order to try and achieve this (and in part to fend off folk like us), so the best advice might be to simply forget the algorithms and cut to the chase: provide quality information related to your chosen niche.
Just downloaded your guide and it is concise and I am going to be spending some time with it. Can really relate to CPC research. One of 1st sites I put up 3 years ago gets regular traffic every day and I make anywhere from 4 to 10 cents a click.
How necessary it is to have a separate .com domain for each wp blog and keyword?
I am probably going to try phpbay but he referenced your methods. I have been on the wrong track for too long.
Thanks, Maggie