While reading around some SEO blogs this week, from some of the leading SEO companies in the UK, we came across a blog post advising how to write content for websites. The blog in question stated that Internet users have a limited attention span and don’t like to read reams of content (which is true) and that your content posts should be short and to the point, written with short sentences.
Ah, now they’ve gone a little off track with their advice. You see, while it is true that the Internet audience want their information quickly, without having to route around for it or having to concentrate for too long, writing short blog posts with short sentences is not the way to increase your traffic or rankings.
Did you notice how that sentence was 45 words long?
Search engine spiders prefer longer sentences because it gives them more to work with in terms of assigning relevance to keywords, and of course it helps with semantics. The more information present, the more variables that are present, the easier any search algorithm will find it indexing and categorising your content.
For example, if you were to write about StuckOn being an SEO company in Ellesmere Port, you could write:
StuckOn is an SEO company in Ellesmere Port.
There’s nothing wrong with this sentence, it’s grammatically correct and it’s to the point. According to the advice on the SEO blog that we read, this would be the correct way to format a sentence for SEO.
However, that’s not the best way to do it. In that sentence Google has the words ‘StuckOn’, ‘SEO’, ‘company’ and ‘Ellesmere Port’ to go on. There isn’t much else in there in the way of keywords or related phrases.
A much better way, for SEO, to format that sentence would be:
StuckOn is an Internet marketing company specialising in search engine optimisation, located in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire.
With that sentence Google has the phrase ‘Internet marketing’ to fit alongside the phrase ‘search engine optimisation’. Cheshire has also been added as a regionally targeted location, enforcing the area of Ellesmere Port as being located within Cheshire. All of this helps the significance of the sentence to be highlighted, and the geographical location of the content to be pinpointed.
Keep your blogs and sentences short for SEO purposes? Not on your Nellie!
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Good Points… associating other words with keywords and keyword phrases does extend the phrase and adds value to the sentence.