What Are The Functions Of Body Text In SEO
Body text
Body text is that text visible to readers of your site, but not included in a header. When you look at pages of this book, for example, the text that’s between headings is the body text. It’s the same for web pages.
Although you’ve already used keywords in several places on your web site, body text is another place where you’ll want to include your keywords when possible. There is no hard-and-fast rule on the number of times that your keywords should appear on a page, but a good rule of thumb is that you use them about once every paragraph or two, on the condition that they make sense in the content of the site.
What many people who are optimizing their sites don’t realize is that all the strategies for SEO can be overdone, including the use of your keywords in the body text of your site. You should use these words regularly in your text, but don’t use them out of context or just as a ploy to improve your search engine standings. If the keywords don’t work in the normal flow of the text on the include them. Nonsense will gain you no points at all with search engine crawlers.
Body text should be placed into your web site using the body-text tags: <body>Insert Body Text</body>. These are not the only body-text tags that you’ll use, however. In addition to the tags that indicate where your body text begins and ends, there are also tags that indicate special formatting in text. Those tags are:
<b>Bold</b>
<i>Italics</i>
<strong>Strongly Emphasized</strong>
<em>Emphasis</em>
<li>New Line in List</li>
Each of these tags indicates special formatting for the word or phrase within the opening and closing tags, and the special emphasis makes a search engine crawler take notice of those words. Therefore, if you can use keywords within those tags, you should try to. But the same rule applies to these
sformatting options for body text: Only use keywords where appropriate and avoid stuffing keywords into your site simply to improve your search engine rankings. If you use those tactics, it’s likely they will fail.
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Making your web site’s body text visible (or readable) to search engine crawlers isn’t all that com- plicated. Even so, many site designers still struggle with the issue, because there are certain text styles that cannot be indexed by search engines. These styles are often used on web sites in an effort to improve the appearance of the site. Some of the text visibility issues that site designers contend with include:
■ Text embedded in JavaScript applications or Macromedia Flash files.
■Text contained in image files (including those with these extensions: jpg, gif, png, bmp).
■Text that is accessible only on a submission form or other portion of the page that requires
some action or interaction with the user.
If search engine crawlers can’t see your web-site text, they can’t index that content for visitors to find. So having “seeable” content is essential to ranking well and getting properly indexed. In some cases, you must use a graphic, a special type of formatting like JavaScript or Flash, or even forms that contain text. If you must use these unreadable forms of text, try to optimize your site by using keywords in headings, title tags, URLS, and alt tags on the page. Just remember that go overboard with embedding keywords into headings, or other tags.
CAUTION
Never try to hide text on your site in an attempt to “fool” search engine crawlers into thinking your site is something it’s not. If you try to include text on your site that’s the same color as the background, or if you use other types of CSS tricks, you run the risk of being detected by search engine crawlers. And even if those crawlers don’t detect your trickery, it’s just a matter of time before some competitor or even one of your users discovers your dishonesty and reports your actions.
Writing well for search engines is both an art and a science, and is covered in more depth in Chapter 11.
