Page Content for SEM

Importance of Text Content

By now most people have heard the oft-repeated mantra that “content is king” to building a successful web presence.  But this raises an important question: What qualifies as content?  Clearly content is anything that is of interest to site visitors including downloadable music, video clips, electronic books, online games, etc.  However for websites looking to take advantage of free traffic generated through search engines, the mantra should be refined to state that “plain-old text content is king”.  While search engines have added many new features and capabilities for searching different types of content (e.g., searching video files, audio files, pdf files, etc.), web searching is still dominated by the basic text search, and more importantly, results of a search are still dominated by text content that matches the user’s search query.  One of the main reasons for this is that search engine robots that crawl the Internet locating information do so by examining the underlying code of a site.  Presently, these crawlers perform much better when the code is associated with plain text compared to other forms of content. 

For website marketers this means sites should still be principally text-based if search engines are to easily understand what the site is about.  Site’s should keep non-text content, such as multimedia (e.g., Flash), to a minimum so as not to be the major content portion of the site or, if it is the major content item, non-text content should be supported with plain text material. 

Additionally, important wording should use text and not graphics.  For instance, look below at our own KnowThis.com logo:

Like most site logos this appears to be text but in actuality it is a graphic.  While stylistically a text in graphics may appear attractive to a human visitor, search engines are generally unable to read text contained within a graphic.  Until search engines improve their ability to interpret graphics it is generally good site optimization practice to use text over graphics for important words, especially if these words are likely to be used within a user’s keyword search.  If graphics must be used it is recommended that a special ALT tag be included within the coding of the site.  The ALT tag essentially allows the website marketer to describe the graphic using text.  While useful it still is not a replacement for plain text content.