Make every word of your message on your website count!
Make every word on your page count!
I was talking with a potential customer the other day. He had built his website himself and was working at building his links but he was getting nowhere in the search results. He hasn’t engaged me to optimise his site – yet (I’m still hopeful), but I offered him a little free advice – get ride of the junk from your pages.
Unfortunately, he didn’t know what I was talking about.
In this particular case, the pages were filled with embedded and inline style information and some javascripts. We discussed this a little more and I discovered that he had used a visual editor to prepare the code. He didn’t have any understanding of the underlying construction of a webpage. He just used the editor and it produced something he liked. So he published it.
Unfortunately, many of the visual editors leave “junk” in the pages they produce.
“So what’s the problem? You can still see my words and my images” I hear you ask.
The issue is this pushes your important words down in the file that produces the page and it dilutes the strength of these words in the eyes of the search engines.
The placement of your message and the strength of your message are important factors used by the search engines to rank your pages. Anything that reduces the value of these factors, reduces the effectiveness of your web pages and the opportunity to be found by your potential customers.
So was I able to help this potential customer? Maybe. With no knowledge of HTML and the underlying nature of web page construction there was no real point encouraging him to remove the junk. Rather, I suggested he start adding more content – new pages or additional text to his existing pages.
This will do 2 things – make sure the search engines know his site is active and change the density of his message within the page.
So the message to everyone else, if you can’t remove the junk, add more content. Even better, ask me to quote on removing the junk for you.
If you want to know if you have “junk” on your pages or have any questions about any of the issues raised on any of our pages or if you have any general SEO questions, please contact us and we’ll try to help (or ask you to become one of our customers).