In the world of Search Engine Optimization professionals, it is well known that Content Is King. Content is a broad category consisting of dozens of media types – text, images, videos, audio files, graphics, slideshows, etc. The content we’ll be discussing in this blog post is text content.

Benefits of Content for SEO

Content is food for Google. The more relevant, quality content your website has, the more information Google has to draw upon to serve your website as a resource for incoming inquiries. People don’t just search for, let’s say, “San Diego Dentists”. Some times they’ll search for “San Diego wisdom tooth removal” or “south california oral surgery”. The variations range in the tens of thousands for unique searches.

A wide variety of content ensures that search engines will pick up on many, many phrases included throughout your content. The more content you have, the larger the variety of terminologies. And, because search engines such as Google have become more strict with how they rank sites on their listings, you can’t simply just throw out all of those special terms onto your website and expect to rank for all of them. New algorithm changes in search engines require that you have a good size of quality content supplementing that terminology.

So now we know why content is good for picking up traffic for many searches, but how do we implement that content?

Types of text content

Articles are informative and educational. They are usually written in a more professional tone and have a goal to impart knowledge. If your website is utilizing the amazing WordPress platform, these ‘articles’ will be placed on Pages. For this type of content, aim for articles of 600 words or more.

Blog Posts are casual and light-hearted. They are written usually to keep up to date with your patients and website visitors. These can be announcements, dental contests, images or graphics, videos, etc. They can be informative as well, but if you’re going to write a big article on oral care-taking, for example, you’ll usually want to stick with an Article or Page.

Videos are fantastic for websites. They give so much depth to the information you present. However, because search engines can’t “read” videos, you’ll want to supplement the video with a text transcription of what you’re saying to gain full benefit of that content.

Images add a nice visual flair, but like videos, text from images doesn’t translate into SEO. That’s why you should really be using title and alt tags as well as adding captions for each image.

Slideshows can be used to showcase a series of elements. There are many free slideshow applications and resources out there for websites. People love to share these media elements – videos, images, slideshows – to their friends on their social media pages. While text-content is ultimately best for SEO, visual media is best for social networks.