Google is dumb - Google knows everything. Between these two extremes is leeway for countless gradations that address the valuation and assessment of Google’s “Artificial Intelligence“.
During the course of the year, it has become increasingly difficult to deliberately improve a site’s ranking using specific keywords. The good old "text + link building = ranking" has not been working as it did when originally released by the largest search engine in the world for some time now.
So, how can we write a website text that appeals to readers and bots alike?
There is no "ideal" text length or "ideal" word count. Before beginning writing, you have to do a little homework to later have as clear an outline as possible. This is what I do when writing rankings-oriented text:
If the text is supposed to focus on a specific search term, it often helps to do a Google search. Google’s favorites will appear first and you can find inspiration for your own text.
And, at first, you don’t even need a tool for a manual analysis of important, frequently occurring search terms. Thanks to Google, similar search inputs can be read under the SERPs in "used search queries". When you use this together with Google Suggest, multiple important keywords and combinations come together quickly. Of course, this needs to be done with an empty cache and in your browsers’ incognito mode so that the results are not manipulated by your own searches.
With a W-question tool, you can then check which questions are most often queried and searched on any given topic. The questions are often similar and yield the same results, just using a different sentence construction. Nevertheless, this can also provide more ideas for text structuring and subheadings.
Next, you should consider you expect from your article on a given keyword. What would you want to know if you had searched for keyword XY? What information would you expect from a top-ranked site? With this catalog of questions, you can research the answers and then seek to answer these in your text as precisely and completely as possible.
To fine-tune your text, you can run it through the TF*IDF tool. This tool shows you the terms belonging to the keyword set that Google expects from a text on this topic. Additionally, you can check the term weighting of your manually researched keywords and adjust them as necessary.
Figure 1: TF*IDF analysis with OnPage.org
Figure 2: Using this text assistant from OnPage.org, you can comprehensively optimize your texts.
So, you can see that text length cannot really be determined beforehand. The common practice of text length limits is rather a question of budget.
Text length depends on the following factors:
Google’s search engine bots crawl and index many millions of websites every day. This requires a lot of resources. So, it’s understandable that Google wants to be able to handle many search inquiries with one URL. This means that a site’s contents must be able to qualitatively answer as many search inquiries as possible using only one keyword. This has many advantages:
Of course, planning the content of a text is only the first step. The best content is no good if it is not written and prepared with your target group in mind. You should bear the following factors in mind:
For internal linking, you should also incorporate short paragraphs or individual sentences into the text to enable cross-linking by topic.
A website with only text is naturally less interesting for visitors, even if it’s chock-full of information. The visual layout and introduction of additional content formats are very important to be able to later give positive signals with regard to the user experience. So you should enhance your text with the following elements:
It is not always necessary to publish a text that is as comprehensive as possible. It can also be short and to the point, as long as it has everything it needs to make it stand out. It is important that each text be written with a "header". I have described here how this can be approached. The reader will notice this immediately, and search engine bots will be happy to get such high-quality input - and we all know what this means!
Published on 03/06/2017 by Oliver Wrase.
Oliver Wrase juggles with words and phrases in his expert articles to provide his customers with the best. With his great affinity for online marketing topics, he never misses a trend. His main areas are online editorials, research and editorial consultancy.
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