Body Optimization

Think of body optimization as a method to better highlight the topic of your page and thus keep the reader interested. Just like a chapter in a good book, your body text should convey the message that you are trying to deliver.

Try to keep focused so that the page refers to topics relating back to your keywords. If you find that you are introducing a new topic that is not related to one of your keywords, then put this information on a new page. The more pages available to optimize, the greater the opportunity there is for your site to rank for a keyword phrase in a search engine.

Below is our growing list of recommended principles to follow for body optimization. All these rules come from extensive research and have been implemented in our Professional SEO Tool. Rather than optimizing your body text manually, our tool will analyze your body text and give you specific optimization suggestions to perform that are specific to a page. Signup Free for the easy way to optimize your body text.

Word Count

Your page should contain 200 to 1500 words. This will give a search engine a solid amount of content to index. Google for example, begins to place less importance on any body text that appears lower than 4095 characters on a page.

Make sure each paragraph relates to the general theme of the page as well as the keywords you are optimizing for. Also, make sure your body text is unique and fresh! Simply adding content taken from another website will flag your page for duplicate content and it will be excluded.

Exact Matches within Large Text

Search engines are constantly trying to improve their body text analysis algorithms. In a nutshell, these algorithms are designed to interpret a webpage's body text the same way a person would read a website.

The larger the text on your webpage, the more it stands out to the human eye. For this reason, it is important you include your keyword phrase throughout your large body text.

Identify large and small text with our Content Analyzer Tool.

Exact Match Prominence

The first group of text that a visitor reads on your site should contain your keyword phrase. After all, if your document truly represents your keyword phrase, then why wouldn't it be part of your first sentence? It will not only grab the users attention to indicate the topic of your page, but search engines will love it too.

Try to make your keyword phrase appear within the first 10 words of your body text. This will do wonders for your body optimization.

Text Size Distribution

A good-looking webpage has a nice balance of large text and small text. Check out any good blog or article and you will see a general format of a heading (large text) followed by a paragraph (small text). This process will be repeated throughout the page having each heading outline the topic of the paragraph, which contains more detailed information. This format gives a reader an easy way to skim through your document and find what they are looking for.

Search engines also like this format to figure out the important topics of your web page. Since your page can only contain so many words, you need to make sure you do not overuse your large text. If you have 30 headings and only one paragraph, then how can you determine the overall theme of the document? Likewise if you had 1 heading and 30 separate paragraphs, then what is the sub-topic of each paragraph?

The human eye likes organization and direction just as search engines do. Create a page that is easy to read by an actual person and any search engine will be able to pick out your theme and keywords easily as well.

Match Proximity

Keyword Proximity refers to how close one keyword is to another keyword. For example, if my keyword were "go", then I would have a proximity of 1 word for the phrase "go dog go".

It is very important that your body optimization does not allow your keywords to be too close nor allow them to be too far away from one another. If they are too close, you could be in danger of over optimization, which you will be penalized for. But if they are too far away from one another, then your page may deemed as not being highly associated with your keyword.

Exact Matches within Small Text

On the surface, small text doesn't seem very important. However, this is not the case. Small text is a big part of the puzzle when it comes to determining a webpage's true relevancy to a particular keyword phrase.

Your large text may be used to capture the readers' attention, but your small text is used to convey the full message of your topic.

Image Validation

This one should be obvious. If you have broken images that fail to display on your page, then you might want to remove them or fix them. Some browsers will automatically hide broken images, but luckily our seo tool will identify these problems for you.

Find broken images with our Broken Link Checker.


I've Optimized my Body Text, What's Next?

Proceed to the Url Optimization guide to continue optimizing your site. Or choose another optimization guide.