The body text refers to your on page written content that is deployed on the individual pages of your website. In Search Engine Optimisation terms it is very important how you structure and organise the text content on each page of your website.

For each individual page you should aim to only include between 300 – 600 words in total. If you feel you need more words on a page you should seriously consider moving that extra content to another section, category or page on your website. A key premises to remember when you organise your on page content is that you’re not only aiming to gain the most SEO value from how you structure and organise your content but you’re also looking to provide a good user experience for your audience.

People who read your content don’t want to be sifting through a couple of thousand words of content on a page. Generally speaking, people like to read shorter and more concisely structured content that is written to the point.

The placement density and proximity of your keywords in your body text plays an important part in the search engine index process. Density can be summed up as the relative frequency with which a keyword or phrase is found within your body text. Its important to have your keywords nicely dispersed throughout the body text on a page. But you need to do so in moderation. Over exploiting keywords within your body of text will only lead to two things; a spam penalty from Google and a bad user experience for your audience. If you focus on writing your content naturally you’ll avoid both of theses problems.

I would recommend having your primary keywords appear once at most in every paragraph that appears on your page. If you have for example 600 words on a page and that is broken into 4 paragraphs you should try and place your primary keyword at least 3 times in the body of text. You should ideally place your keywords as close to the start of each paragraph as this will indicate keyword prominence to the search engines.

You will also give the page of content more SEO Value for the search engines to pick up on if you use a couple of semantic equivalent phrases throughout the body content. Having good substitute words or words that go hand in hand and supplement your primary keywords well will give your page a lot more viability for search engines. Latent semantic indexing is becoming more and more prominent with the search engines and its having more of an influence on how a search engine determines a search query.

You should use bold <bold> or <strong> and or italics <em> or <i> to identify keywords in your HTML. This helps both search engines and human readers interoperate your key text. You should avoid using the underline <u> tag feature anywhere on your page as to do so may confuse some people who expect to click onto a link.

In summary you shouldn’t neglect your body text content. It’s a very important On Page SEO element which can have a significant baring on the outcome of search results. With the correct layout and structure of your content and the right balance in terms of keyword placement you will be able to achieve some significant on page SEO results.

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