How to Write SEO-Friendly Content for Your Website
SEO is one of the most important aspects of digital marketing today. In a world where the majority of people tend to research the products and services themselves, online content has become indispensable.
Brands now use their own websites and publish content that helps their prospective customers in their research. Additionally, the content also fulfills the role of implicit advertising. If done correctly, such content can influence the readers’ decision to buy from a particular brand.
SEO services can tailor their strategies to align with your brand identity, target audience, and industry trends, ensuring that your online representation resonates effectively with potential customers.
However, if the content in question is not SEO-friendly, it will not become visible to a lot of people. As such, it will fail in its purpose of marketing and lead generation.
That is why it is important to write content that is in line with SEO guidelines. Content written this way ranks higher and attracts a lot of organic traffic. In this article, we will look at how you can create SEO-friendly content.
Tips for Writing SEO-Friendly Content
These are some important tips that will help you write articles, blog posts, and other types of content in an SEO-compatible way.
- Target Relevant Keywords
- First and foremost, you should find out the primary, and secondary keywords that are used in relation to your content. Keywords are the search terms that users type into search engines when they look for something.
- Using these keywords in your content is the first step in making it SEO-compatible. When search engines find the keywords in your content, they understand that it is related to a user’s search query. And that’s how they show your content as one of the search results.
- This is a very basic explanation of how search engines work. In reality, you cannot use too many keywords at once as that is known as keyword stuffing – a black hat SEO technique. Search engines penalize the use of black hat techniques by either lowering the rank of the offending website or removing it from their index.
- To prevent this, you need to use long-tailed keywords or secondary keywords. They are related to your primary keyword. By mixing the use of primary and long-tailed keywords you can avoid stuffing while still telling the search engines what your content is about.
- Find and Target the User Search Intent
- When people search for something on the internet, they have one of four kinds of search intents:
- Informational
- Navigational
- Transactional
- Investigational
- Informational intent is when the user is trying to find new information. It can be “how to do something”, or even “what is the weather forecast for this week?”
- Navigational intent is when the user is searching for a specific website or resource by name.
- Transactional intent is when people search for things they want to buy soon or even at that moment.
- And lastly, investigational intent is when people are researching where to buy things and what to buy. Investigational intent usually turns into transactional intent at some point.
- Finding the right intent and making your content address it is necessary to make for SEO-friendliness. Long-tailed keywords also have the benefit of being very illuminating with regard to search intent.
- When you match the keywords and the content with the correct search intent, search engines are able to show them in the appropriate searches. This increases the chances of people coming to the webpage and engaging with the content, thereby raising the rank of that page.
- Write Easy-to-Read Content
- Content readability is an important requirement of SEO. That’s because search engines have become smarter and they take into account visitor satisfaction when ranking a page.
- This satisfaction is measured by a few things such as dwell time and bounce rate. Dwell time is the amount of time spent on a page, while bounce rate is the number of people that leave the page without taking any actions.
- If your articles are difficult to read, they will reduce the dwell time and increase the bounce rate. This tells the search engines that the content is not satisfactory and they reduce the page ranking.
- By writing easy-to-read articles, you can do the opposite; improve dwell time and reduce the bounce rate. Consequently, the SERPs ranking of the webpage will increase.
- However, writing easy-to-read content is not so simple. Sometimes you are forced to use jargon that is confusing for non-technical personnel. In such cases, you need to resort to paraphrasing.
- With the help of paraphrasing, you can explain difficult things in easier words. However, you may be faced with issues if you have a limited vocabulary.
- To deal with that, there is an easy solution; paraphrasing tools. These tools can rephrase online. With these tools, even if you have a small vocabulary, you can make your content easier to read.
- So, it is a good idea to give your content a rephrase online treatment if it gets too difficult to read or understand.
- Add Internal and External Links
- Links are good at signaling that the content is high quality and trustworthy. However, the links need to be high quality as well. Let’s see how they contribute to SEO friendliness.
- First of all, links from other, high authority sites provide your pages with ‘link juice’. What that means is that you can benefit from their high authority as well. These links tell the search engines that a highly reputable website ‘recommends’ your site. This helps in raising the rank of your web pages.
- Similarly, when you provide links to other sites or even your own pages, you tell the search engines that there is a lot of information to be had from this content. This can result in a rise in ranking.
- Not to mention, links on difficult terms or new concepts also enhance the user experience. And we already know that good user experience results in improved ranking.
- Ensure there is no Plagiarism you can check plagiarism from tools like safeassign for free.
- Plagiarized content is not SEO friendly. That is because using copied content from other sites is a black hat SEO technique. Naturally, this means that if you indulge in plagiarism, your website will be penalized.
- Obviously, that is not a good outcome with respect to SEO. So, to prevent it you have to make sure that there is no plagiarism in your work.
- Even if you don’t commit plagiarism intentionally, it can be present in your work through sheer coincidence.
- This is called accidental plagiarism. Another type of plagiarism is self-plagiarism—when a person plagiarizes their own content.
- To deal with this you have to check your content for plagiarism with the help of an online tool. Then when you are done checking, you need to reword the parts that don’t need to be attributed while removing or citing the rest.
- Human rewording still has the chance of accidental plagiarism, so you need a different solution which is a rewording tool.
- A tool is better than manual rewording because it can use a larger vocabulary of words. This reduces the chances of plagiarism occurring in the reworded content significantly.
Conclusion
These were just five tips for writing SEO-friendly content. Most of these tips are actionable. You can start implementing them right now. Some of them, on the other hand, require some preparation and research.
By incorporating them in your writing, you will be able to improve the SERP ranking of your web pages.