You hear the same thing over and over again – content is king. It is king because this is the base of what web users are searching for, but it is also the king of SEO land – if your content fails to deliver, you will not have good results on the long run nor get a satisfying page rank. Of course, not all content is created equally. While content which is optimized for search engines will be less attractive to the user, focusing on efficiency and interface may cost your search results. And here comes the ultimate questions, how can you bring your site to the line between SEO and usability?
1. Content length of a page – The ideal length of a SEO page is 250 words. If the user experience allows it, you should have at least 250 words of pure content, excluding the title or the sidebar content or other adjacent information. This being said, 250 is the lowest you can go. As a general rule: the more, the better. In fact, a webpage that has around 1,000 words has much greater chances at being indexed for its keywords. Naturally, there are pages where 1,000 words are just not worth it because so many words would affect the user experience. When you have a blog that relies on guest posting, limiting the wording is a definite no-no. The best examples of this practice are category pages or e-commerce websites. In these cases, you might as well optimize the categories for a certain topic and adding at least 250 words in the header of the page might help as well. But looking from a usability point of view, categories exist so that users can navigate and view products or content from a certain category. Adding 250 words could affect the usability. A decent compromise would be to insert a small portion of static content in the main content header of the category pages. 300 characters should do the job.
2. Scanning paragraphs – By definition, a paragraph is a text division which is smaller than a chapter or a scene. Generally, it has at least 4 sentences. Dividing an article into paragraphs is really important because it literally helps the visitor scan the article/page. Knowing that you want a minimum of 250 words per page, how can you make this content user friendly? How can you make it easy to scan so that users will read it? When you write paragraphs for a website, there is a different rule. You can aim for paragraphs that spread across 2-5 rows, that is 3 to 6 sentences. However, it is recommended to keep them to a maximum of 5 rows.
3. Titles – What happens then you have more that 250 words on a page? When you speak of more than just 1 product or service. How can you keep the user interested in the page? By structuring the content. Theoretically, you need to divide the content using header tags. They will create pauses in the content, making it easier to read while offering breaches in the content to spread the user’s attention all over the page.
Keyword Density and SEO
While there are many SEO techniques that we can talk about, it is always important to underline that your web content needs to be user-friendly. A general rule when you want to create usability and also please the search engines is to create content for people. At the end of the day, search engines exist to give users the most relevant content possible. If you follow every possible SEO guideline in the world, there are high chances that you will end up having content which is not user friendly. And one of the greatest paradoxes is that if you have unfriendly content, it probably won’t attract back links. Always think of the user before you think of the search engine. But keep in mind that there are some tactics which you can apply and aim to please both of them. Keyword density is one of those tactics. Keyword density is represented by the number of times a certain word appears on a page. A SEO expert might tell you that the ideal density can vary from 2% to 5%. The only problem there is that for a user, even 3% keywords density may seem suspicious. For example, if a word sums up 3% of the total of words he finds on a page, he will find the page to be rather robotic, hard to comprehend and probably label it as spam. You can insert keywords in your titles. Indeed, if you use variations of the keyword to create optimized titles, you can gain one more percent of keyword density without making the copy unnatural and compromising it. This is especially valid when you have a news website, personal blog or focused on guest posting and generally with every website that is based on the quality of the content to attract visitors. One of the biggest things between usability and optimizations are unarranged lists. This will help the content become easier to scan by the user and for search engines, they are like broken content – which means they don’t mean that much as the rest of the content when it come to keyword density. There are 2 ways to maximize the usability of these lists. First, you can use unarranged lists in the upper part of the page to underline the content of the page. These will help the user find what he is looking for faster and navigate more efficiently throughout the page. If you do this, don’t forget to write an introductive paragraph before, along with the minimum content of 250 words. Not only will this help the user, but it will also help web crawlers index your page more precisely. Alternatively, you can place one of these lists somewhere on the lower side of the page, closer to the bottom or as part of a subsection. If you have enough content that precedes this list, this list will be less likely to count when the page is being indexed.
