Google’s John Mueller Shares How To Improve Your Page Content for SEO 

Google’s John Mueller has taken part in another Webmaster Hangout and of the many questions he fielded from web masters, a couple have shed some interesting new light on how you should go about improving your web page content. In particular, he was asked about the importance of headers and how product pages can be improved. Read on for a few tips from the Google guru on these themes…

Text Prominence vs Images and Other Media Mueller was peppered with many questions as is standard anytime he does a hangout session, but he was asked a fair bit about page content and how it can be harnessed for the best possible SEO outcome. Mueller was openly asked by a member of the audience about product page descriptions (PPD) and if in terms of page layout, having the images and other none text elements moved down the page would work better. If the text takes priority at the top of your page, does this help with your SEO?Ultimately here the question is pretty fair, in the past text and naturally keyword use and placement within text has been praised as being of vital importance. Mueller though was very quick to shut this theory down and immediately responded with a negative, explaining that "just shifting the location of content within an HTML page I don’t think that plays a big role at all.” He went on to explain that search engines like Google are ever more sophisticated and they understand the kind of page they are on. When it comes to product pages, the search engine spiders are programmed to fully expect images and media to take pride of place alongside the text. So long unique product descriptions exist on the page, there is no need to give too much thought to the layout in terms of prioritising the text over images. Headings are as important as you might think Mueller was also asked about the use of page headers and whether that impacts on your SEO. In the past, page headers were considered a significant part of letting search engine crawlers know what you wanted them to rank your page for. SEO conscious web designers would always ensure page headers included high priority keywords as a result.However, Mueller suggests this is a poor example of how headers should be used today. Instead, he provided a detailed suggestion that headers should be used appropriately to break up the sub sections of a given page by illustrating what the following section of content is about. They should not be used as a shortcut way to fill the page with prominent keywords.He went on to suggest that the page’s overall content and the amalgamation of all the sub headings would ultimately allow the engines to piece together what the page was about and how to rank it. He also suggested that the more diverse the topical content around the main theme, the more the page would be likely to rank for variations of what may have been considered the page’s core keyword theme.