Optimizing your body content

And now we turn to optimization of the body content, the text on the page. One of the ironies of search engine optimization is that the actual words on the page are somewhat overshadowed in ranking power by other elements like title tags and inbound link count. And while you can rank for competitive phrases without the text on the page (with massive link-building campaigns), body text remains a heavily-weighted component of search rankings.

Along with this topic, we will also dig a bit deeper into the concept of keyword density. Keyword density refers to the amount of keywords as a percentage of total words on the page. While keyword density applies to any web page element, it is of particular importance with respect to body content.

First, what is body content? Body content is the visible part of a web page: the text, images, and other elements (video, forms, and so on) that appear to viewers within the four corners of the browser window. This includes text in...