Straight from the disembodied head of Matt Cutts… “Don’t forget the body” when you optimize your website.
Each page of a website is made of at least 3 main parts.
- The Head: This is where links for style information, scripts and meta tags (Title, Description) are found. The code in the Head is not directly visible when someone visits your page.
- The Body: This is where the main visible portion of your page is. So, what visitors see when the view your site. The main body copy, images, etc.
- The Footer: This also has contains elements that are visible to visitors, but it can also contain scripts and other code.
When it comes to website optimization, one aspect of optimizing is to make sure that the Title and Description meta tags are unique and include keywords relevant to what the page is about (pay no attention to the “Keywords:” meta tag. The search engines don’t, so why should you?). Many people get caught up in thinking this is all that matters and think if the put a bunch of keywords in the Head and meta tags, they will rank high for those keywords. Sadly though if the body content does not include the keywords, they likely will never rank well!
Google continues to improve and is trying to make their search results better. They are looking at the content on websites and what the site is about. Without keywords and content in the body of your pages it will be very difficult for Google to understand what your site is about.
So, listen to Matt’s head, and don’t forget about the body.
