It may not seem like it, but search is an industry that relies heavily on words. Google might be introducing all sorts of exciting, whiz-bang features these days, but its algorithm is still a giant, text-eating dinosaur. The search engines graze on words, and if your site doesn’t have the right ones in the right amounts, you can kiss a good ranking goodbye.
One of the things many sites are having difficulty with is wrapping their heads around just how much text-based content they need to succeed. In the early days of search engine optimisation, intelligent competition for spots in the search engine results lists was low. This meant that people could get away with fairly simple optimisation campaigns. A few of the right keywords placed in the right places, and you were in.
These days, everyone has a few of the right keywords in the right places. In fact, depending on the industry you’re in, it’s likely that your competitors have the right keywords placed in exactly the right places. This means that it takes a little something extra to get the search engines’ attention. Often, that extra something is simply more pages, and more text.
Why text?
Due to the search engines’ reliance on text for content, a site needs to have sufficient text to attract search engine attention. The giant index of Google logs thousands of internet pages, and most of what it pays attention to is words. Although the search engines keep releasing statements saying ‘we can finally index [insert multimedia format here]‘, they really don’t have a good track record with reading anything but text efficiently.
This doesn’t answer the question of ‘Why more text?’ Although the exact factors involved in the rankings calculations aren’t known, it has been discovered through thousands of in-field tests that the more text you have, the more likely it is that you’ll rank for your chosen keywords. This is a far too simple way of putting something that involves a complex system, but essentially the more text you have across your site, the bigger the canvas your SEO plan has to work.
This doesn’t mean that featuring lines and lines of text on your pages guarantees you a prime spot in the search engine results. That would be far too easy. Your text does have to remain in balance with the other aspects of search engine optimisation, such as relevancy, quality of content, site usability and reputation. Talk to us at SEO Consult Australia about the requirements of optimisation. What it does mean is that no site can afford to skimp on text.
When text becomes an issue
The average site owner underestimates how much text is needed. All over the net, sites still feature pages that have lots of wonderful design aspects and tiny amounts of text. Sites that are switched on to SEO contrast sharply, as they have hundreds of pages with solid textual content. These are the ones that rank competitively. Talk to your SEO consultant about improving your text content.
