Make your website’s words work

Learn why you need to think about words for humans and robots alike

REQUIRES

RapidWeaver

you will learn

How using words in different places in your websites helps build your search rankings

IT WILL TAKE

30 minutes

Some website owners focus really hard on their site’s visual design and don’t pay too much attention to the words on their web pages. That’s a mistake, because the words on your site make a massive difference to the two groups that’ll be looking at them: humans, and Google’s robots.

Let’s start with the latter. Google’s software crawls the web, scanning pages and classifying them. The specifics of how it does that change over time, but fundamentally Google cares about the quality of a web page. Old tricks such as sticking in popular keywords – “You don’t have to be Britney Spears to get a great gravel driveway!” – don’t work any more, and while it’s important to include any relevant keywords in your website, there’s no need to get carried away.

That doesn’t mean you can’t give Google a hand, though. META tags, which are bits of data that describe a page, aren’t visible to human visitors to your site. However, they are visible to Google, and the right ones can help make your site easier to classify and find. You’ll learn how to work with META tags in RapidWeaver in the walkthrough on the next page.

As for the humans, who better to turn to for inspiration than Apple? One of its copywriting tricks is to talk about “you;” to say “Take them out and they’re ready to use with all your devices” about AirPods instead of eulogizing about frequency ranges. The old adage “Sell the sizzle, not the steak” is good advice for sales sites – but even completely unsalesy sites benefit from this, too. You can talk about what “you” can see, do or feel, where “you” can go, what “you” can experience, how whatever you’re writing about makes “your” life better.