SEO Basics: The Most Important Text Elements
You would like to know how to prepare the content on your website so that it can be found by search engines and, in the best case, ranked well? Then you are in the right place. Here you will find the most important content elements for your search engine optimization (SEO).
1. Page title
The page title is equally important for users and search engines. If it is individual and appropriate, it will be displayed in the search results and will also appear in the browser tab and as description text if your customer bookmarks it. Make sure that you give a short and concise description of what it is about, integrate the main keyword of the page and ideally text it in a way that makes the searchers curious.
It’s best to limit your title to about 55 characters. Although search engines will cut the title if it exceeds the pixel length of about 530px and you can never tell 100% without a tool how many characters that actually is, but if you don’t feel like testing your title with an external tool, this is a good guideline.
2. URL
The URL of your page is also visible in the search results. So again, make sure that the directory structure and thus the terms of the URL match and contain the correct keywords. So search engines and your readers know immediately what the page is about, which is a definite advantage for you. Always use lower case letters in URLs, separate words with hyphens and not with underscores and avoid special characters.
3. Meta-Description
The meta-description briefly describes the content of your site and is not directly visible to your readers on your website. However, it is stored in the source code for search engines and is used by Google to describe your search results. But please note that Google will only display your description if it fits approximately in length — it should be around 150 characters long — is unique and relevant for search queries. If this is not the case, search engines will create their own descriptions from your content, which of course are rarely as good as the ones you could create.
Headlines
Always define suitable main and sub headings for your texts and integrate the most important keywords whenever possible.
Also make sure that you use so-called H-tags for your headlines. The H-tags allow you to define a main heading (h1) and subheadings up to the sixth level (h2, h3 … h6). Always pay attention to a correct structure. After the H1 main heading (of which you should only have one per page), you subdivide your paragraphs with H2 headings and if you want to subdivide these paragraphs even further, you use H3 headings etc.
Text Marks & Enumerations
From time to time, it can be helpful for readers and search engines if you display certain text elements or the most important points in bold or italics. In addition, enumerations and lists help to summarize the most important points and present them clearly.
Internal links
As you already know, search engines, just like some visitors, move from link to link to discover more content. Use this, for example, to link suitable, topic-related articles to each other in the text, if it makes sense for your visitors. This strengthens your internal link structure and helps your visitors to find more interesting pages.
Pictures
Usually it is a good idea to use pictures to lighten up your text. But don’t forget that crawlers can’t actually see your images, as your readers usually can. That’s why it is very important to give each image an appropriate alt attribute, a replacement text. There you can enter in text form what is to be seen on the image. This is also a good way to integrate keywords, if it makes sense.
If you use all these content elements and take care to write really good texts, with content that interests your target group, you are already very well positioned from a content SEO perspective. If you also publish valuable content regularly and update your existing content, nothing stands in the way of your long-term SEO success, at least from a content perspective.
