Boilerplate Content: How Does This Type Of Content Affect Your Website?

What Is The Point of Boilerplate Content?

Boilerplate content has many points, such as branding the website and making essential links, information, and resources readily available to users. In addition, this makes web design, development, and maintenance easier by allowing certain assets to be reusable.

How Does Boilerplate Content Work?

Boilerplate content is used on every page of the website in some capacity. You might have some variations depending on the type of content served on a specific page type. Still, this predictability helps users to familiarize themselves with your website. In addition, this type of content helps search engines more clearly understand your pages' primary context.

How Can You Use Boilerplate Content To Strengthen Your Relevancy To Your Target Keywords?

You can strengthen your relevancy to your target keywords by providing semi-structured data that helps search engines better understand your content. For example, giving your boilerplate content proper Semantic HTML tags will help search engines more clearly understand the structure and layout of your pages.

For example, your top navigation should always be wrapped in a <header> tag. Your footer sections should always be wrapped in <footer> tags. Anytime you have a group of links used for the purpose of navigation, you should always contain them with a <nav> tag. If you have an advertisement or CTA, these should always be in a <aside> tag.

These are only a few examples, but we will be creating resources in the future to help you understand what semantic tags there are and when you should be using them.

To understand how these practices can help improve your SEO, you first need to know how the algorithms behind search engines handle boilerplate content.

How Do Search Engines View Boilerplate Content?

The algorithms behind search engines view boilerplate content with very little importance. There are actually methods referenced in several Google SEO patents that deal specifically with identifying and omitting boilerplate content when evaluating the relevancy of a page for a given topic.

Boilerplate Content & SEO

How Should You Use Boilerplate Content?

You should be using boilerplate content for the sole purpose of helping users navigate, recognize, and understand your website. These recurring pieces of content should simply be a means to improve the experience users have while visiting your website.

You should never use them for any part of your SEO strategy. No essential pieces of your SEO strategy should ever make an appearance in these types of content.

How Boilerplate Content Can Improve Your Website

Boilerplate content can greatly improve your website by giving users a sense of uniformity. This repetitive nature expressed with a boilerplate will help users understand, navigate, and use your content more easily.

In addition, if you follow proper Semantic HTML usage, you will also help search engines in much the same way, leading to a higher perceived quality of your website in the eyes of search engines.

How Boilerplate Content Can Get Your Website Penalized

Boilerplate content can get your website penalized by spamming keywords in them. You never want to contain any content valuable to your SEO strategy in boilerplate content. Any keywords you use repeatedly throughout your website or a client's website will get you penalized.

For example, if you own a company called "Example Company" that provides "web development" in Dallas, Texas, you could safely have the name of your company "Example Company" as a link in the client's footer pointing back to your website, you would never want to have a link with valuable keywords in it.

So, for example, "Dallas Web Development By Example Company" would most likely get you penalized. You can, however, have a piece of text that says "Web Development By" and then have a link "Example Company," and you would be fine, but you never want the anchor text in boilerplate content to be targeting keywords you are targeting.