Adding "Spider Food" to Your Content
Boring plain text isn't good enough
The days of ranking content with basic walls of text are long gone.
If you want to rank a page highly in Google you need to make it as easy possible for Googlebot (aka the spider) to crawl it.
There are a few different elements you can add to your pages to make them more crawlable. I like to refer to these as “spider food”, since Googlebot LOVES seeing them on webpages.
Let’s take a look at a few different ways you can make your posts more dynamic and easier for Google’s spider to understand.
Elements you should add to your pages to make them more crawlable
Subheadings
Subheadings are by far the most important type of spider food.
It’s going to be almost impossible for your article to rank if you don’t have properly-nested subheadings with relevant keywords.
This is what I mean by “properly-nested subheadings”:
H3’s only go under H2’s
H4’s only go under H3’s
H5’s only go under H4’s
The only time you should use an H1 is as the post title.
NEVER base your subheadings on what “looks good” visually. They serve an extremely important role in your on-page SEO. If the subheadings are out of whack, Googlebot won’t be able to crawl them and it’ll hurt your rankings.
Since Google’s spider loves subheadings, it’s important to include relevant keywords. Your main focus keyword should be in one of the H2’s. Use related keywords in most of the other subheadings. Also make sure include a few subheadings that don’t have any keywords so your content isn’t overoptimized.
You should always base your subheadings around the ones that the other sites on page 1 for a query are using. Obviously don’t copy/paste, but paraphrase them so they have the same meaning and hit similar keywords. SEO Minion is a good tool that can help with this.
Bullet point/numbered lists
Any time you’re listing anything it should be in either bullet point or numbered list format.
Examples include things like:
Product sizes
Steps for how to do something
Different versions of a product
Ingredients
There’s no situation where you should list things in a sentence using commas. It’s difficult for a human to read and it’s hard for Googlebot to crawl.
Images
You need images in every single one of your articles.
If the post is a best-of list or product review then you 100% NEED to have unique product images.
If you can get your hands on the product then obviously taking your own photos is ideal. If you’re at the level where brands are paying you money to send you products then taking pictures is a no-brainer. If the product is available in physical stores you can go and take photos there as well.
If not, then I recommend following this guide to create your own “unique” photos: