Chapter 2: Establishing Content Depth and Page Length

In This Chapter

Writing for maximum readability

Varying content to increase user interest and search engine ranking

Formatting your text for optimum readability

Enabling user-generated content

Writing an effective call to action

Search engines find out what your web pages are about by reading them. They read everything they can find on your site — the text on your pages, the text in your HTML code, the names of your files and directories, and the anchor text in all your links (which is the text someone clicks to follow the link). They also read the anchor text of any inbound links to your site from other people’s web sites to find out what those sites have written about you. Using all of this textual information along with a few other factors like links and Engagement Objects, search engines determine what your site is about, what search terms your web pages are relevant for, and how much of an authority you are on your topics — and then rank you accordingly.