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More and more companies are using social media to manage their online presence. But research shows that people are more likely to trust businesses that have their own website. Consumers usually use Google, Bing, or Baidu to search for goods and services, and if a company’ website doesn’t appear on the first page, a potential customer will be very likely to go to a competitor. If you want to make sure your website is among the top search results, its pages need to undergo SEO, or search engine optimization.
Some of us still remember when search engines were focused exclusively on finding exact matches between a search request and the contents of a Web page. In order to cozy up to search engines, website designers used to sprinkle lots of keywords like “buy plastic windows” throughout their pages, sometimes in odd combinations. As a result, we ended up with a lot of useless, hard-to-read Web pages.
But time marches on, and search engines have evolved. A page’s rating now depends not just on whether or not it contains certain keywords, but also on its content and the quality of that content. Search engines consider:
When we write SEO content for our clients at Logrus IT, we try to take a “best of both worlds” approach. We start by writing text that’s easy for readers to understand, carefully structuring it, intelligently placing thematic keywords within it, and connecting it to other texts based on its topic so it has a better chance of making it into the top of the search results. Today we’re going to share a few clever tricks that will help you create Web pages that are optimized for both search engines and readers.
How to attract search results to your website
People don’t read the internet like a book. They skim it, which means that websites need to have text that users can glance at and immediately grasp what to look for and where. To do this, readers look at things like headers, subheaders, lists, and images, and these things are all searched and evaluated by Web crawlers.
Web crawlers are special programs search engines use to analyze all the Web pages they have access to. They gather and classify information that then helps Google, Bing, and other search engines determine how useful a given website is for a user who enters a search query.
Every page of a website should have a header (indicated by the tag <h1>). For an article or blog post, this is the title; for a page in an online store, it’s a product category, etc. Headers help both users and search engines recognize a page’s topic, although search engines need a little help – it’s a good idea to include 1–3 keywords in the header and, naturally, make sure it fits the page’s contents.
Subheaders (designated by the tags <h2>, <h3> , etc.) visually break the page’s content down into logical parts. Subheaders should be added every 2–4 paragraphs or 300–500 words based on the logic of the text. Each header should reflect the main idea of the part of the text it leads to. For search engines, it’s a good idea to include relevant keywords and LSI phrases (more about that later) in the subheader and repeat one or two of them in the next paragraph.
Every page of a website should have a header and subheaders
Another useful tool for making your content better is lists. Lists help you highlight and organize key ideas. When used wisely, they improve a text’s structure and readability.
When adding lists to a text, we stick to the following rules:
An example of how to use lists in Web content
Another way to increase user retention and enhance SEO is to add images such as charts, diagrams, maps, screenshots, and even memes to your text. As always, they need to be “on topic” and not just added for their own sake, and they should be used in moderation. Here’s a little trick: It’s better for SEO if your images have captions underneath them with one or two keywords from the main text. It’s even more important to have an alternative text or “alt-text” that displays on the page if the image can’t be displayed for some reason. Web crawlers can’t see your images, but they do read the captions you put under them.
Before posting content, make sure any images are technically optimized – if they’re several megabytes in size, this will seriously reduce the speed at which the page loads, which will also impact its rating and its popularity with users.
A text’s structure matters to people as much as it does to search engines. However, there are also other factors that affect SEO, but aren’t as noticeable to readers, such as keywords and metadata. Let’s review these things now.
First of all, modern search engines know grammar. They can change word order and even choose synonyms, and, generally speaking, they try to work with natural language. This means that there’s no longer any need to shoehorn clunky constructions into your text – “cheap earpiece with a sensitive microphone and a wide range” works just as well as “earpiece microphone earbuds cheap” (actually, it works even better because the algorithm could consider the second option to be substandard text).
Search algorithms don’t like it when a text is overloaded with similar keywords, so try to write naturally and informatively. Then the words you need for SEO will appear in the text on their own and in reasonable quantities – but it might be a good idea to run an extra check too.
“Beacon” words can be divided into two types. Keywords are specific concepts that define a page’s topic. LSI (latent semantic indexing) phrases expand that topic by bringing in related topics. For example, for an article about home repair, keywords could be "wallpaper,” “floor tiles,” and, naturally, “repair,” and LSI phrases could be “interior design,” “DIY,” and “move.”
Keywords and LSI phrases for a given text are often selected and provided by the client. When this happens, Logrus IT’s writers and editors make sure these elements fit into the text in a natural, logical way. We ensure that high-priority keywords appear in headers, metadata, and introductory and concluding paragraphs, and longer key phrases are evenly distributed throughout the main body of the text. We also sometimes recommend avoiding certain LSI phrases if they stray too far from the text’s main topic.
We were once given an LSI word for an article about the Edge browser, and that word was... “bicycle!” Although there was some small amount of research suggesting that these words were connected (there are Edge-branded bicycles), we eventually convinced the client not to use it. People who were interested in bicycles would be unlikely to discover our article through a search engine, and the extraneous word could also damage the article’s SEO.
When we’re asked to choose keywords on our own, we perform a preliminary analysis of the project plan and ask the client questions to identify the text’s core topic and objective. Then we use brainstorming and special tools to analyze the pages of other, similar companies and the “similar searches” section in search engines to gather relevant keywords and LSI phrases, then rank them by popularity and significance for the text.
Metadata is a collection of HTML attributes that aren’t visible on the page itself. This data can appear in the search results, and then the user will use it to decide whether or not to go to that page and read the text. By the way, even if, say, Google creates its own description for your page, metadata will still come in handy because it’s read by Web crawlers.
So what do we need to know about Metadata? First of all, it should attract attention and reflect the meaning of the text. This means that the meta-description should include a brief summary of the text and pique the reader’s interest (in moderation, of course!), and the meta-header should include a question or interesting numbers from the text.
Second, the metadata shouldn’t get cut off. To avoid this, make sure meta-headers aren’t more than 50–60 characters long and descriptions aren’t more than 50–60 characters long. It’s a good idea to use two or three keywords in the first hundred characters of the description.
What is UX Copywriting, and Why Does It Matter?
If a person is interested in something, they usually don’t stop at just one website when looking for information. Search engines know this and award “bonus points” to pages with hyperlinks to thematically-related texts – especially if they’re links to other websites. That being said, it’s important not to just toss random URLs into your text – you need to think through what you’re linking to and how to do it.
Web crawlers follow links and evaluate the pages they lead to, so the text at the other end of the link needs to be at least as good as yours. The safest thing to do is stick to authoritative research, encyclopedias, and other reliable sources of information. Links to popular social media pages work pretty well too.
Interconnected Web pages
The links on your page shouldn’t be too clustered together. To convince the search engine that a link isn’t random, it’s a good idea to use keywords and LSI phrases that are shared between the two pages. Lastly, don’t quote entire paragraphs from your sources – first of all, this isn’t very ethical, and second, it reduces your text’s uniqueness and therefore its search rating (one or two sentences should be okay).
To create a text that will be effective for your online brand, you need to strike a balance between SEO, readability, and quality. When it comes to SEO copywriting services, Logrus IT’s specialists can write informative articles and landing pages, structure them in an easy-to-read way, and integrate keywords and connect the client’s text to other authoritative resources. On top of that, Logrus IT is always ready to help you choose relevant topics while factoring in your specific preferences and adapting our approach to meet your needs. If you need text for your website or blog, we’ve got your covered.
