Google’s Matt Cutts Stresses the Importance of Body Content

If there’s one thing to remember in digital media marketing, it’s that SEO and content marketing go hand-in-hand. A search engine’s job is to rank content and companies that provide high quality content are the ones that see highest rate of success with search engine results.

In the latest (humorous) video released by Google’s Head of Spam Matt Cutts, Matt stresses the importance of body content and made quite the statement with his cropped out body in the video.

“It’s important to pay attention to head of a document, but you also pay attention to the body of a document.”

The “head” of the content might have meta description, meta tags, meta keywords, etc. which is great to include, but shouldn’t be your entire focus. Body content is just as important and makes a big difference when Google is searching for the right pages to refer to users.

Body text that complements the “head” pieces of a document will drastically improve your content and provide value for Google and readers.

While we’re on the topic of content marketing and providing value and substance in body content, here are a few best practices when creating content marketing for your business:

Best Practices for Creating Page Content

Don’t settle for pretty good – content marketing in the form of blogs, eBooks, videos, whitepapers, infographics, press releases, images, podcasts should offer value to your readers in order to be effective. Content must provide:

Research

Make sure to do thorough keyword research in order to have a deep understanding of your target audience. It will be extremely helpful to come up with buyer personas.  Personas will help you discover your audience’s demographics, roles, and behaviors so you can figure out where to reach these people (whether it’s through a blog, social media, or other medium).

Format

Use a consistent keyword or set of keywords in the head of your content (title tag, meta descriptions, meta tags, URL) and within the text itself. The title should closely match what you think the searcher would type in. Additionally, make use of H1, H2, and H2 headers.

Placement

Make sure to put all your content under the same domain/subdomain (www.mywebsite.com/blog)

Substance

Add images and video to your content which will make your content more appealing on your website and on social networks. Create content that encourage people to share to others. Blog posts should be at least 300 words to provide enough substance for Google and the reader.

Sharing

Share content through social media channels regularly to build social signals and popularity.

Don’t Be Sneaky

Bad anchor text, exact match domains, duplicate content won’t work, you’ll just be wasting your time and money.