SEO for Content Writers
The content decisions that affect whether people find your pages in search
The most important thing to know about SEO: write for people, not search engines. Google's own helpful content guidelines say it plainly — content that's clear, specific, and useful outperforms content stuffed with keywords.
Page titles and headings
The page title, what shows up in the browser tab and search results, and the main heading are two of the strongest signals about what a page covers.
- Be specific. "Volunteer Opportunities" is fine. "Volunteer Opportunities in Portland" is better. "Volunteer to Deliver Meals in Portland" is best.
- Put the important words first. "Meals on Wheels People — Volunteer" is weaker than "Volunteer to Deliver Meals — Meals on Wheels People." Users scan from left to right and search results truncate from the right, so the most important words should lead.
- Don't repeat the org name in every heading. The site already establishes who you are. Headings should focus on the topic.
"Volunteer to Deliver Meals in Portland"
Specific, action-oriented, includes the location.
"Get Involved"
Could be any organization, any activity, any city.
That title in a Google result:
Volunteer to Deliver Meals in Portland — Meals on Wheels ...
See open volunteer roles, time commitments, and how to sign up. Deliver meals, support a dining center, or make friendly phone calls.
Image alt text
Alt text describes the image for people who can't see it and helps search engines understand what it shows. Write it for the person first.
- Describe what's happening, not just what's in the frame. "A volunteer delivers a meal to a smiling woman at her front door" beats "volunteer" or "meal delivery."
- Skip "photo of" or "image of." Screen readers already announce it as an image.
- Keep it concise. One sentence is usually enough.
- Don't keyword-stuff. "Meals on Wheels Portland Oregon volunteer meal delivery service donate" is not alt text. It's spam.
"A volunteer delivers a meal to a smiling woman at her front door"
Someone using a screen reader gets the same warmth the photo carries.
"Meals on Wheels Portland Oregon volunteer meal delivery service donate"
Useless to a person, and search engines treat it as spam.
Not every image needs alt text. Decorative images — background textures, divider lines, purely visual flourishes — should have empty alt text so screen readers skip them. In the media library an image can't be saved without alt text unless you tick Decorative — nothing to describe, which clears it. Documents like PDFs are never asked for it.
Meta descriptions
The meta description is the short summary under the page title in search results. When you write one:
- Keep it under ~155 characters. Google publishes no official limit — they display snippets by pixel width, and the length has fluctuated over the years. 155 is the practical desktop safe zone; mobile truncates around 120.
- Describe what the visitor will find, not what the organization does. "Request home-delivered meals or find a dining center near you" beats "Meals on Wheels People provides nutritious meals to seniors in the Portland metro area."
- Include a natural call to action when it fits: "Learn how to sign up," "See open volunteer roles."
Google rewrites meta descriptions anyway when it thinks it can build a better snippet from the page. Write a good one, but don't agonize.
A visitor-focused description that fits:
Get Meals — Meals on Wheels People
Request home-delivered meals or find a dining center near you. Check eligibility and get started with a quick form or a phone call.
And an organization-focused one that runs long:
Get Meals — Meals on Wheels People
Meals on Wheels People has been providing nutritious meals to seniors throughout the Portland metro area since 1970, serving Multnomah, Washington, and ...
Structured data (JSON-LD)
You don't need to write or understand structured data. It tells search engines specific facts about your organization and pages in a format they can read directly, and we handle the implementation.
The legacy site carries a generic set and stops there: an Organization record, a breadcrumb trail, a description of each page. A news post isn't marked up as an article and a dining center isn't marked up as a place, so neither is eligible for the richer results those types unlock.
The site goes further. Each type, and what it needs from you to be worth having:
| Type | What it powers | What it needs from you |
|---|---|---|
| Organization | The knowledge panel: official name, logo, EIN, contact, social accounts | Confirmed legal name and EIN, a logo file, and the social accounts you actually use. We'll use the more specific NGO type with 501(c)(3) status stated in the markup |
| Local business | Each dining center reading as a place rather than page text | Accurate address, hours and phone per location, kept current |
| Event | Events shown with date, time and location | Real start and end times, a venue address, and whether registration is needed |
| Article | News posts shown with headline, date and image | A headline, publish date, and a featured image on every post. The organization is the author |
| Breadcrumb | The page's path shown above a result instead of a raw URL | Nothing. It follows the site structure |
| FAQ | Bing and the AI answer engines reading your questions and answers directly | Questions phrased the way someone would ask them, each with a direct answer |
Events and news posts are worth paying special attention to: a missing end time, venue, date or image doesn't break the page, it just forfeits the feature.
Job openings carry JobPosting markup too, built from the descriptions the site reads out of Paycom. See Careers. Video isn't on the list, since it's embedded from YouTube or Vimeo rather than hosted on the site.
Your Google Business Profile sits alongside all of this and is a major driver of how the organization appears in search. It's managed separately from the website.
Structured data doesn't add facts, it makes the ones already on the page machine-readable. Some of it no longer wins anything from Google and is still worth having, because Google isn't the only thing reading it.
What you don't need to worry about
We handle the technical side: site speed, structured data markup, sitemaps, canonical URLs, mobile optimization. Focus on writing clear, specific, useful content.