The Guide to Writing SEO-Friendly Content

Search engine optimized (SEO) sites that also have high authority and well-built backlinks are known to rank higher in search engine results. You know it by now– if your pages rank higher, they show up on the main page, engage better, and end up getting more clicks, shares, and likes.

On the other hand, if nobody ever finds your page, even exquisitely-written content will be useless and will end up buried deep within the World Wide Web.

This is why writing SEO-friendly content is highly relevant for all businesses, and why you want to ensure you adapt yours in such a fashion to follow some simple SEO guidelines.

While this isn’t a particularly easy task, once you learn some basics and strategies, you will find the whole process incredibly approachable and easy to tackle.

What does having SEO-friendly content mean?

SEO-friendly content is content written in such a fashion to help search engines rank your page higher, so it’s easy to find. In many marketers’ mind, this means you have to stuff your content with keywords, but according to specialists and professional writers, this will only make your content difficult to read and unnatural. Plus, it will make the topic you are trying to cover hard to understand and useless to your audience.

Having SEO-friendly content is about much more than just focusing on keywords and their placement –it’s about the content you write, as you will see in the following paragraphs.

Use headlines and sub-headers

The way you use headers and sub-headers will influence how well your site pages rank and how your readers perceive your content. When used properly, headlines and sub-headers make your content more skimmable, easier to read. When people are able to understand and get information easier from your content, they are more likely to share it and become more engaged with your website.

The same thing will happen in the case of search engines. When crawling through your pages, they will see and recognize headlines and try to understand your content and its relevance. By adapting your headers and sub-headers will also improve the level of keyword saturation of your content, without stuffing it too much. However, ensure to find the right balance of keywords.

Add links to previous content

SEO specialists recommend linking to previous content on your website because of a series of reasons. First, search engines rank websites based on the number of backlinks they have. The balance between external and internal backlinks should be a decent one.

Backlinks will help both search engine robots and visitors find your best content. When it comes to external links, ensure that you only link to reputable platforms and websites that already have high authority. Use other sites’ validity to increase yours through backlinks.

Even if your content is researched and packed with data, if you don’t offer credible sources, your audience won’t take the information there for granted. Use credible sources for all your external backlinks and place them where they sound natural and flow well within your content.

Ensure you Optimize the length of your posts and articles

Back in the days of the Old Internet, you might have stumbled upon articles of only several hundred words. In the past, the more articles you would publish, the higher your website ranked. Well, today, content writers have to focus on creating high-quality content, without necessarily focusing on the number of articles out there.

Finding a good length for your articles is the key to optimizing your content in such a fashion to make it SEO-friendly.

During the past couple of years, Google has modified its algorithms in such a way to give higher priority to longer, higher-quality articles. The idea behind these algorithms is to offer visitors the best answers to their questions and plenty of research materials for their interest areas.

While it’s not enough to write 400-word articles, watering down your content with unnecessary information is not doing your website a big service, either. To determine which posts generate the highest rates of engagement, go to Google Analytics and see which seems to be the optimal content length for your visitors.

Also, ensure the quality of your content is high. You want error-free content. Otherwise, you will lose authority and visitors. Use tools and apps targeted at maintaining content quality. Platforms such as Grammarly and The Hemingway Editor are great tools that will help you create accurate, error-free content.

If you are translating the content you have on a website to offer options for different languages, ensure that you use professional translation services or tools. Using these will allow you to offer your clients and visitors accurate content, but also preserve the relevance of your keywords. Tools like iTranslate, IsAccurate, or even Google Translate can help writers ensure their content and keywords are still relevant, regardless of the language used.

Be Mindful of Your Keywords

When writing your content, it’s ideal to find a strategy that works for you in regards to your choice and use of keywords. While many marketers choose to ignore keywords until they finish writing the content, and only afterward to incorporate those where it is possible, this is a faulty mindset.

The best approach is writing down your keywords and incorporating them as you write the content. Start by identifying the keywords that are relevant to your topic. You can think of your keywords yourself, or you can use dedicated tools. AHREFS, KW Finder and these other 10 free tools recommended by Neil Patel all do an amazing job at helping you improve your keyword research.

After you determine which keywords are the most relevant for your content and topic, use them in your headlines and sub-headings, as well as in the content. But avoid overstuffing your site with keywords, as it can end up looking spammy.

Ensure your images are properly optimized

Integrating images within your content makes it more engaging, sharable and emotional. When trying to improve the SEO ranking of an e-Commerce platform, pictures will make visitors more likely to purchase from the website.

To ensure your images are properly optimized, try to add keywords to the image files and give them alt tags. The size of your images also contributes to how search engines rank the content on your webpage. Images that are too large will slow down the loading speed of your content and will make it unreadable. This will damage your ranking in the long run.

“Your images should be big enough to have a good level of visibility and quality. Balance is, once again, the keyword here.”

Ensure you have shareable content

Optimizing a website to make content more sharable is a key to engaging more visitors and turning them into sales. Once you create SEO-friendly and rich content, ensure that you add buttons to share the content on social media platforms. Tools like Add This and Share This allow you to integrate social media share buttons easily. This will help your visitors to share the content they like in a matter of seconds.

High-quality, rich content

While your SEO tactics do matter a lot, having high-quality content will increase the visitor engagement rates as well as other variables, like time spent on the page, page clicks and so on.

Marketers are all aware that to succeed, they have to create rich, informative content. Make it easy to read, engaging and entertaining, since most visitors seem to agree this is what they search for in the online content they read.

…

**About the Author: Bridgette Hernandez has a Master in Anthropology and is hoping to plan and publish her own book in the near future. She is a content editor at SupremeDisserations and also works with professional writing companies such as GrabMyEssay and HotEssayService as a writer.