SEO Tips: Can a Picture Say a Thousand Words?

Page Content is the text or copy that appears on a web page. It is a very important component of the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) process.

Generally, in any printed book or brochure text, all content is relevant to the viewer, and the more illustrations, the better and the more interesting. In fact, you'll probably know nthe old saying "a picture says more than a thousand words".
However, this is definitely not applicable to crawling search engines. In the world of SEO, Google and Yahoo have, until very recently, only been able to read text and not images.

Nevertheless, surprisingly enough, many would-be webmasters put keywords into online photos, designs and flash images.

Don't misunderstand us: images are, and will always remain, important visual parts of any web page ; without them, life on the Internet would be dry and boring. But in SEO, text is king.
The most drastic example we came across was the web site of a lawyer who was very disappointed that his site never got Google search results even for search terms in his special field and therefore wanted us (SEO Trump) to redo and optimize his site. Little wonder he had been invisible: his small web site not only lacked any meaningful SEO such as titles, keywords or links but consisted almost entirely of flash !

More recently, Google has begun to "learn" to read images but the jury is still out as to what degree, and how this will translate into SEO relevant results. In the meantime, it remains imperative for any optimizer to write search engine-friendly text copy.

Page Content is, then, for SEO purposes, the textual description of a web page. It follows quite logically that proper and well-though-out keywords are essential for content as well. Our articles about H1, H2 and H3 headlines and about keywords provide introductions to their relevant topics, so we don't need go into detail here ; however, they are a useful complement to the subject of page content.

Web page copy should be relevant to the topic of the message you want to convey. This goes without saying; irrelevant or unclear messages would blur or even kill ad copy in any media. On web pages, they would, additionally, undermine the SEO structure because Google and the other crawlers are looking - surprise, surprise! - for relevant keywords.

Make sure you have your keywords in place but don't write just to please the crawlers; draft your message and only then try to improve it for SEO purposes. Your words should be relevant for the search results you want to be found by but be fluid, readable copy. And don't overload your page with keywords, or else the search engines can penalize you for keyword spamming or stuffing.

And remember: while good headlines are important, so is a well-written main body of content.