What’s the minimum amount of content I can get away with?

There are no hard and fast rules here, but guidelines suggested by SEO experts are that a homepage should have 500+ words and other pages should have 300+ words. In most cases, adding more words will give you a better result – but remember you are not just adding content for the sake of it. All text content should be concise, informative and answer any questions a potential customer might have about your business/product.

Pages with more content are generally proven to perform better in search engines, but remember at the same time that people don’t want to read a novel. This is where formatting comes in. You should break your text up into smaller, easy-to-read chunks, with descriptive headings so that users can see at a glance whether the information in this paragraph is important to them.

Formatting longer text blocks

If you have a lot of information one topic that you think might be of interest to some users but not all, you can use tricks such as adding a Javascript-powered “read more” button. to these sections. These type of buttons limit the size of a paragraph to a certain height, until the user clicks “read more” at which point the entire section is revealed. This can have multiple benefits as it keeps your page looking clean and concise to human users, and doesn’t bog them down with unnecessary info, but search engines will ignore the button and read the entirety of the text anyway.

This kind of functionality can be added using a liteweight javascript extension, such as https://jedfoster.com/Readmore.js/

How should I use keywords in my content?

Even though your content will be crawled by a computer algorithm to extract information, you should write all content so that it makes sense to a human, and avoid keyword-stuffing. When you do drop in a keyword, it needs to fit within the context of the surrounding text.

As a general rule, if you wanted to rank for a particular keyword, lets say for arguments sake you sell “bedazzled mousepads” – you want at least three things:

• A section heading on your homepage with the keyword “bedazzled mousepads” in it.
• A paragraph beneath this heading that also featured the keyword in context.
• A separate page on your website specifically dedicated to the keyword, eg www.example.com/bedazzled-mousepads – this page will also have the keyword in its title and featured at least once in its 300 word description.

If you follow this format then search engines will have a pretty good idea that you are in the “bedazzled mouspads” game.

Just the beginning…

It would be nice if that was all there was to getting a good organic search engine ranking, but this is just one of many (many many) factors Google and other search engines use – however it’s definitely one of the most important and easiest to remedy. In time I will add more SEO advice. If you have any questions, please get in touch.

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The issue here of course is that while modern smartphones leverage up-to-date HTML and CSS methods to render email content almost identically to a website, Outlook still relies on the MS Word rendering engine, which is limited, to say the least.

So here are some common issues you will come across when designing responsive email templates, and how to get around them.

Tables

While divs are the element of choice for dictating layout on most websites these days, email templates still commonly use a table-based layout. This is again due to issues with Microsoft Outlook. You can still put divs into your template, but certain styles such as padding will not display correctly in Outlook when applied to a div, although it will for a table.

When you specify a table as a layout-based item, it’s recommended to give it some standard values so that it doesn’t go and add any additional pixels to your design. Specifically you will want to set cellpadding, cellspacing and border values to 0 as shown in the example below.

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0" style="border-collapse:collapse;">
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>Contents go here...</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

Custom Fonts

Custom fonts are something else that won’t load in Outlook. Fortunately, there’s a workaround for this, which allows a custom font to be displayed in all modern browsers, with a safe fallback font specified for Outlook users.

The first step is to add the link to the custom font file you will be using, for instance if we wanted to use the Google Font “Open Sans”, add the following to the <head> of your template

<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Open+Sans&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Now we have to specify where this will be used, and what the fallback font will be. The way we will achieve this is by specifying the fallback font in the td where our text is, and also giving the td a class name – usually something simple related to the name of the custom font you’ll be using. For example:

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0" style="border-collapse:collapse;">
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td class="open-sans" style="font-family: 'Arial', sans-serif">Contents go here...</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

This means the contents of the td will be rendered as Arial in Outlook (this can be substituted for any other default system font). We can then use a CSS media query to override this with our custom font. The logic here is that any email client that can read a media query (Outlook can’t) can also handle custom fonts.

<style>
@media screen {
  .open-sans {
    font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif !important;
  }
}
</style>

Don’t forget to use !important, or this will not work. Please note as well that the safest way to do this is to apply this class name and default text style to EVERY td that you want to change the font for. In some cases it may work if you just apply this to the td of a parent table and let it trickle down, but the safest way is to apply this to all tds.

This is just a rough intro, I will add more of these as I think of them.

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