Multimedia Mastery : TEXT
Text
Even though this guide is meant to teach you how to expand beyond just text content, it’s still important to understand that text will always be a big part of internet content. It’s still going to be easier to rank well with written content than other types of content (generally speaking) and a lot of visitors still prefer to read rather than watching videos or downloading items.
Even if you’re using images, videos, and downloads, you’ll want to use text as a good portion of your content, and you’ll use text even on the pages that use other forms of media to bolster your SEO.
SEO for Text
There have been some changes recently to the way Google indexes and displays its results. You may already know that longer content is ranking better than shorter content, in general. But did you know that updating your old content is also now very important if you want to improve your rankings?
It’s important to keep these changes in mind as you create your content so you can be sure you’re giving Google exactly what it wants. Let’s take a look at some of these important new changes.
Length
As you probably already know, Google now greatly prefers longer content. A few years ago it was possible to rank well with 300-word articles, but these days it’s much easier to rank with content that is a minimum of 1,000 words. In fact, it seems that the longer the content, the better.
Although you should never add unnecessary words just to boost your word count, make sure you create content that is as long as possible without risking readability.
Updates
A long time ago, if you had something new to say about a particular topic, you’d create a brand new article on your blog or website. You might link to it from the original article, but generally you’d use it as an opportunity to create a new piece of content that might rank in the search engines.
This is no longer a good idea, because Google now seems to favor updated content more than new content, especially because updating old content adds even more length to the content.
In fact, it’s a very good idea to take a look at some of your most popular articles and see if anything has changed in recent times that you might add to the original in order to update it. This can give you a significant boost to your original content’s rankings.
