Importance of footer text in SEO

Read further only if you are serious about SEO.
Have yo got a footer text on your blog? Most of you do.

What’s a footer text?
The small code of text you see below your blog template.
Well, it isn’t always small text. That was the old times. These days, we have wordpress templates that have large footers.

You thought this is just an “out of the box” thinking eh? Not really.
In SEO, footer text carries some importance.As much as the link density on that page.If you have read my earlier post on what’s a best SEO friendly layout, then you might have noticed what i said there.

- The last and the first thing a crawler sees is the most important thing to you.

So the first thing a crawler see is your header image/links/about you url? Well, I’ve also talked about how to keep things in place and without re-arranging and how to get crawlers crawl the best portion of your page.

So, let’s talk more about footers and how they will help you rank high?

Footers are of two types(as of now.)
1 – The traditional small text footers(like you see here) mostly with the copyright text and a few email links etc.
2 – The bigger,evident web2.0 style footer text with category links and content.

If you have the first type of footer – nothing wrong.In fact it’s easier to tweak to a crawler and get our stuff done.But if you have the second type of footer(web 2.0 style), then you have an advantage – you attract the crawlers as well as human visitors – the golden rule of SEO!

Be it first or second type, what you should be bothered about are the following things.
- Is your keyword present in your footer text?
- Is there a link with your keyword?
- Is there the right keyword density within your footer text?
- Is it clear and evident to your human visitors?
- Does it look spammy?

Now you’d have got an idea on what’s important in a footer and what’s not.
In the footer text – please avoid special characters and unwanted content.Like the copyright notice.Instead, please add more relevant content.A footer text is as imporant as your body text content.

So i would not recommend a footer text like this – “Yourdomain.com Copyright – 2007, Your Address, and your Signature damn it!”

Instead i would recommend this – “Yourdomain.com, Your keyword or your blog description with your keyword with a link to one of those most important pages in the blog.”

So you get the idea.If possible, keep the category links at the footer, this will help the crawler know what the stuff is on your page.This s because, crawlers give more or same importance to the footer text(or what they see last on the code) than the content on the page.

Now it explains why a web2.0 styled large footer is preferred to a traditional style copyright statement right? But if you have one panic not. Just change it to a well drafted statement embedding your targetted keywords and links or categories even.

So much for an evil tip on How to rank high on search engines.

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