Digital Compass

The code that makes up your web page’s text falls into two categories—visible and invisible—and they are both important for optimization. The visible text is made up of the words that you put on your page for the world to see, including obvious things like the paragraphs of carefully crafted content aimed at your target audience but also less-obvious elements like your page title,

The text inside your links, and the navigational text that tells your visitors how to use your site, such as “Click the thumbnails for a full size image.” Invisible text refers to the words that do not display on the page but are added to your HTML code and gathered and analyzed by the search engine robots. This includes your meta keywords tag, meta description tag, and your ALT image tags.

Your Site’s Message

We can’t say it enough: Your site’s text needs to be compelling, clear, focused, and directed to your users. It also needs to be formatted so that the robots can read it. This means HTML text, not graphical text, which the search engines can’t read. If your site doesn’t have any HTML text, adding some is critical to getting the search engines to give your site the visibility you desire.

Take a look at this page full of text.

Unfortunately, almost all of the text on the page is composed of GIF files, not HTML. So, to the search engines, it looks like this.

HTML Page Title Probably the most important of the visible text elements is your HTML page title. In the code, it looks like this

On the page, it looks like this

And in the search engines, it gets top billing, usually as the bolded first line of a search results page, like this

The page title is Eternally Important because it gets maximum exposure in the search engine results pages. If you care about getting clicks to your site, this text should be succinct and compelling, and for your best chance at conversions, it should accurately summarize the page content.

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