How To Make Your Content SEO Friendly
Search Engine Optimized (SEO) friendly content on your blog is one of the best ways to grow your business without spending too much on your marketing. An optimized website, with strong domain authority, will help rank higher in search engine results. Producing valuable content is just one part, consistent efforts to make it SEO friendly will boost your work and help reach it to the target audience.
Over the years, SEO has come quite far. Gone were the days where a high volume of low-quality content was enough to fulfill your expectation of ranking higher in the search engine results. In today’s time, SEO is as much as an art and science. Content writers, digital marketers, and SEO professionals are optimizing for and continuously dealing with the ever-changing and updating algorithms of the search engines.
Good quality content along with good SEO will help you reach a wider audience and encourage more customer engagement. There are various SEO related tools that can help you in optimizing your content. Some of the most popular ones are Ubersuggest, Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, and Ahrefs.
In this article, we go through the eight most important tips to follow for making your content SEO friendly. However, before we get started with that, understanding SEO-friendly content and its importance are essential to forming a solid base.
What Is SEO-friendly content?
SEO-friendly content is curated by experts/professionals to improve rankings and increase the organic traffic to your website. Digital marketers find it challenging to create content specifically that attracts organic traffic.
As a marketer, if you think that stuffing the text with your researched keywords is going to make your content SEO-friendly, that is wrong. A well-researched article with appropriate and targeted keywords that are placed strategically can help you increase your visibility.
While creating SEO-friendly content will require a little more effort compared to what you put in to create general normal content, we ensure the results will be worth putting in those, efforts, time, and resources. SEO-friendly content has a higher ROI in comparison to your normal content. You need to optimize and be careful with things like the title of the post, the structure of a blog, text formatting, headings, and paragraphs, word limit, URLs, images, etc.
Importance Of SEO
SEO is about writing content that helps you stand out from your competitors. On-page and technical SEO is the best practice to rank better in search engines. Producing SEO friendly content can literally take your blog to the next level. Relatable and unique content helps improve ranking, has lower bounce rates, and attracts attention on social media too.
Quality content can help find potential customers and enable you to stand out from the rest. As the organic traffic to your website increases, the likelihood of conversions increases too. With interesting content, you are providing value to your readers. The longer they stay and explore your website, the more familiar they get with your brand name. Eventually, they will establish trust, and bounce rates will fall.
To list it down, the benefits of SEO friendly content are:
- Improved search engine rankings
- Higher organic traffic
- Increased brand awareness
- Attracting social media attention
- Lower bounce rates
- Improved conversion rates
- Competitive advantage
- Additional revenue source (Monetization of the blog)
Tips To Make Content Seo Friendly
Before you begin creating content, add SEO as a step to follow and plan accordingly. Along with writing quality content, in order to outrank your competitors, understanding and working on foundational things that the search engines consider when evaluating and ranking your content is essential.
Creating SEO friendly content requires skills, understanding, time, and efforts. However, if executed correctly, you can expect this investment to pay-off. In order to get your content ranked higher on the search engines, follow the tips mentioned further in this article.
- Insert Researched Keywords
Before you begin to write, find, and plan for the most relevant keywords to include in your content for optimizing it. Target keywords that relate to your topic and niche. The correct keywords help you dominate the search results and reach the right audience.
To select the perfect keywords, know the following about them:
- Search volume in a given timeframe
- Search intent behind the keywords you plan to use
- Focus on long-tail keywords
- SEO difficulty showing competition in organic search
Along with the main targeted keywords, use related keywords, and check for the questions to get more idea about this.
Remember that the location of the keywords, i.e. the strategic placement of your keyword is essential to weigh higher in the search results. Once you have identified the keywords, include them in the title, headlines, main content, URL, meta descriptions, and ALT tags.
- Use Catchy Titles & Headlines
Titles have a huge impact on your SEO. A catchy title will gain the trust of the users and a descriptive one will tell the readers what the whole post is about and how they will benefit from reading the post.
To optimize your title for SEO, ensure to begin your title with the targeted keyword, keep your title under 60 characters, and ensure it describes your post’s content accurately. Having emotional modifiers in your title is an added advantage that helps increase the click-through-rates.
The readability of your post increases if your post is skimmable and easier to read for the audiences. Inserting headers and subheaders increases keyword saturation. Create different heading tags, h1, h2, h3 to maintain clarity.
- Optimizing The Length
Gone were the times where blog posts were a game of numbers and not quality content. In today’s time, the more often you post is not directly related to the traffic you would attract. Google now prioritizes longer (average of 1500+ words posts) and high-quality content. Search engines want to ensure that the users find their answers and therefore they promote detailed posts.
Check out the posts that are often visited, generate the highest engagement, have a high average per session duration and more conversions. Longer content tends to get more likes and mentions on social media too.
In a race to meet the word count requirement for optimizing content, do not forget your primary goal of providing useful and relevant information to the readers. Quality is more important than quantity to address the search intent of your readers. For reference, use Google analytics tools to analyze the impact of content length of the top-ranked articles on Google with the same search query.
- Optimizing Images
Images are a great way to complement your informative content. They make the content interesting and shareable. However, Google can not read the text included in your image or the intent of it, but to prove its relevance, it can optimize the content of the images. Hence, it is essential for you to give proper ALT text, descriptive titles, captions, and filenames to your images.
The readers on your blog can not see the ALT text (unless the image is not loaded), it is for the search engine to understand the content and relevance of the images. Create informative content in your ALT texts that contains your core keywords naturally.
The size of the images should be less, as otherwise it will impact the load time of the site and hurt the SEO. Therefore, optimize the images for size too.
- Write SEO Friendly URLs
URLs are one of the most significant ranking factors, therefore consider it as an essential part of your SEO strategy. Here are the following things that you need to do to create a well-structured SEO friendly URL:
- Include target word in each URL as it helps to categorize and identify the page
- Keep your URL short; around 60 characters or 3-5 words
- Separate words using hyphens
- Preferably use lowercase letters to avoid redirects or errors
- Keep URLs simple and relevant to the content of the post
- Avoid using stop words like a, an, but, and or.
Note that generally, URLs are easy to share and look clean and concise.
- Optimize Meta Descriptions
In search results, there is a summary of your content shown by Google, beneath the title. The click-through rates highly depend on the description that you write. The meta description will include your target keywords and will explain to the readers what your post is essentially about. The keywords in your meta description will help Google find and tag it.
The length of the descriptions is generally about 160 characters. An interesting and informative meta description will encourage the readers to open your link amongst the thousands of results shown on the search engine.
- Include Schema Markup
Schema markups are used to help the search engines analyze your content better. Markup to your blog posts segments each part explains search engines what these parts mean. Google’s ‘Structured Data Markup Helper’ is a great tool to start doing this easily. Leverage the schema markup code to help the search engines to provide rich information to the users even before they visit the website. Schema markup is usually in the header or tagged in the title.
- Have Essential Backlinks
A ranking factor considered by the search engines is the number of backlinks that the content gets. Quality content can get internal plus external backlinks. It can help you drive more traffic and get your old content ranked higher as well.
Internal linking can help the search engines know the relevance of your content, ensures that the reader spends more time on your site, and reduces the bounce rate too. Links help readers understand a topic in more depth.
The more backlinks, the higher will your page rank in search results. Links from high-quality websites get you the validation you are seeking for. However, only use links from credible sources to establish trust. Adding descriptive anchor text to the links can help the reader better understand what the link is about. Do not overdo the links, use links that are relevant, useful, and natural to the readers.
Initially, following each tip for every content piece might prove to be overwhelming and time-consuming. However, know that these practical tips to write SEO-friendly content will prove to be worthwhile for your site in the long-run.
There is no denying that SEO friendly websites drive more traffic and help you achieve better results. The importance of SEO weighs higher compared to the efforts that are needed to put in it. Follow the above-mentioned tips to optimize your content and drive value from it.
Author Bio
Hetvi works as a Marketing Associate at Refrens.com – India’s most powerful platform for freelancer’s finances and growth. She has worked for some renowned companies as a Brand and Digital marketing associate. You can follow Refrens.com on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.
