Matt Cutts Reiterates Importance of Body Copy to Google Search Visibility

There is a tendency among search engine marketers to be meticulous about the header content – title tag and meta description – but more casual about the relevance of body content to the page. It can confuse Google and make it difficult for the search engine to return the page to users. This is the point Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, made in his latest video.

To get his message across, Matt cropped his body out of the video, with a floating head against a white background doing all the talking. What he said isn’t new, but Google felt the need to remind search engine marketers about the importance of paying attention to the body of a document. He said that the best practice for creating a search-friendly page is unique, non-duplicated content. This apart, he stressed on the importance of ensuring that the body content matches the title tag and meta data of the page.

If you are creating a company description or ‘about us’ page, the focus should be on telling the company’s story, the year it started, its mission and ethos, and such relevant information in the body. Selling the unique features of your company’s products or providing case studies on the page will keep Google guessing, and cost you in the search engine ranking stakes no matter how great the actual content of your ‘about us’ page may be. The title and meta data should also accurately describe the specific page. In a nutshell, when your header and body content are in sync, Google is able to decipher and index your page easily, to make it available to users. Remember this straight-forward and valuable SEO tip for your next web copy.