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Body Text
Body text tutorial
The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.
Body text is the visible text on your page which your visitors read when they visit your site (the HTML code looks like this: <body>Place Your Body Text Here</body>.
Here are the basic rules of thumb regarding your body text:
- It is beneficial to feature your keywords throughout the rest of your page (but not as important as placing them in the title and header tags).
- Generally, web pages should have about 200 to 300 words of text with special emphasis on two or three carefully chosen keywords.
- Within your keyword-rich body text, search engines respond favorably to keywords placed within style tags such as, <b> (bold), <strong> (bold), <i> (italic), <em> (italic), and <li> (list).
- Place your best keyword rich text as high up on your web page as possible (such as the first headline and the first paragraph on your web page).
- Comine HTML Tags (i.e., your header tags, anchor tags, and style tags).
Placing your keyword rich text high up on your web pages
Search engines index page content (via the utilization of source code) in linear order and give priority to keywords found closest to the top of your web page. That is why it is very important that you place some of your best keyword-rich text as high up on your web page as you can (such as in your first headline and in the first paragraph on your page). It is equally important to limit (whenever possible) images, javascript, and other HTML code that precedes your keyword rich text.
Combining HTML Tags
We know that text inside <h1> and <b> tags are given more weight by search engines. And we also know that link anchor text is also given more weight. It follows that it can also be beneficial to combine them, when formatting allows (such as <h1><b><a href=’mypage.html’>Cell Phones</a></b></h1>). Therefore, whenever your page layout allows for it, place a sentence or two of text containing the primary keywords near the top of the page in an <h1> tag and then bold the keywords that you want to emphasize and make them links.
[Note: Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can be used to alter the standard appearance of any tag. In such cases, <h1> tags don’t have to make text unusually large, <b> tags don’t necessarily make text bold and links can even be made to not look like links. It all depends on whatever style you’ve assigned the tags within your webpage’s associated stylesheet.css file. You can also use absolute positioning in CSS to arrange your keyword-rich copy so that it appears at the beginning of the HTML source code, regardless of where it actually appears on the visible portion of the webpage. Be careful, however,
using CSS absolute positioning might also cause your page to look very strange if the site visitor uses their browser to resize the fonts for better readability. Be sure to test the look with different browser font size settings to ensure an acceptable design layout].
Next tutorial: Meta tags tutorial
Previous tutorial: Header tags tutorial
This tutorial written by:
Moshe Morris
President of SEMBasics
Chief Research Analyst at Internet Marketing Initiative (www.internetmi.com)
The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.
If you found this page useful, consider linking to it.
Simply copy and paste the code below into your web site (Ctrl+C to copy)
It will look like this: Body Text
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