SEO-friendly content helps the search engines take a better and deep crawling into your webpage and make it available to the users in the relevant search results. It also helps to improve the rank so that the users will readily find it and based on this your webpage will attract the maximum visitors possible.
So it’s important that you follow the correct SEO techniques while drafting your content in order to have a definite advantage in traffic, otherwise, the webpage may not even get noticed by the search engines and even if it does it will be placed where the visibility is only as good as zero.
Here are some extremely important and useful points to help you build SEO-friendly content.
Original, Authentic, and Relevant Content
Major search engines like Google, value and rank your content only when it is original, authentic, and relevant to the search queries. When it says original and authentic, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have come up with something that has never been saying before rather it should not be an exact copy taken from other online sources. Search engines are smart enough to identify duplicate content and such websites are eventually banned from appearing in search results. Secondly, the content must serve specific search queries in the best possible way.
It’s quite normal to take inspiration/ideas from online sources, but copy-pasting them is a horrible mistake. Instead, you should add your own creativity and present it in a way that adds value to the original. To check the originality of your content you can use a tool called Copyscape.
Research-based and Wisely Chosen Title
The popularity or page rank of content essentially depends on the Title and it’s important from both search engines and users’ point of view. The title should be based on what the users are searching for. So you should always begin with keyword research in different search engines to find related titles. Consider the auto-filling suggestions you get while typing in the search box and also check what other people are searching for at the end of the result page.
Once you have decided the structure of the title, here are some best practices you should follow before you select the final Title.
# Keep the characters within 55 to 60. Because when the title is too long, the search engines show ellipses towards the end of it.
# Place the Keywords close to the beginning of the title. For example, if the keyword is “Epic Content” some suggested title would be,
How to Write Epic Content
A Guide to Creating Epic Content
The Ultimate Guide to Writing Epic Content
# The Title should be compelling enough to draw attention and it should have an emotional impact on the visitors in the very first interaction.
Short yet Apt Introduction
Search engines always look for relevance. The first paragraph itself is good enough to tell the crawlers if the webpage has the answers to a specific query made by a user or not. The introduction part must contain the targeted keywords and their position must sound natural. It must address or answer the query to a certain extent so that the visitors will find it appropriate to their search.
The Body – Substance, Interlinking, and Keywords
The body of the content should also be given equal importance because this is what decides if a user will return to your page or not. You can definitely attract visitors with a compelling title, but unless the content has anything useful they will immediately switch to a different webpage.
The text and content should be apt, well explained, and should maintain the substance from beginning to end. The language should be simple, yet convincing and should cater to a particular search query and help the user in every possible way.
The keywords should be mentioned in the body in a careful yet creative way, that they don’t appear artificial and manipulative to the search engines.
While building the content you must understand and visualize the needs of a user. For example, if you are writing a smartphone review and you have mentioned another smartphone’s name for a quick comparison, it’s important that you give a link to the second smartphone’s review page (if you’ve posted) so that a visitor can go back and check, and make a decision based on that. This is called interlinking and this is an ideal way of page optimization.
Content Presentation
Creating long explanatory content is easier than telling the same within a particular word limit. There is tough competition on the Internet and no one has time to read a full-length article. In such a case how you present your content plays a crucial role.
The content should appear as a set of data rather than an exhaustive article. The use of bold or italic words, images, videos, and bullet points to highlight the important points makes it easy for the visitors to scan through it and find what they want. Break a long paragraph into two or three short ones as per their context.
Image optimization
Choose images relevant to the content. Images can be more useful since content can be tiring at times. And sometimes things can be explained better with images rather than text. This is in fact an ideal SEO technique but there are some best practices for using images.
# Be careful about the copyright images for they can put you in trouble in the future.
# Don’t use someone else’s image without their permission.
# Optimize the size of images because the original sizes are usually bigger and they can slow down the page load
# Use ALT text to describe the image
Proof Reading
Either you do it yourself or make someone else do it for you, but make sure the content doesn’t contain grammatical or spelling errors before you publish the page. Of course, you can always go back and correct it on the admin page, but you definitely don’t want your visitors to find out the flaws before you do. Read the content properly from one end to another and correct the mistakes if any.
Quality of Information
After you comply with all the SEO techniques written above it’s quite obvious to expect advantages in traffic and rank. But in the real world, you have to do something extra in order to increase your chances of getting a better position in Search Engine Result Pages (SERP), where the competition is tough already. You have to make sure that your web page is different and better than the rest and that it’s more useful to the users.
All it takes is a simple analysis. Check other websites that occupy the top positions in SERP for the same title as yours and compare your page with them. Find out if they have a unique strategy in terms of content quality, length of text, images, and articulation, etc. This will broaden your perspective about the whole thing. You can either make necessary changes to your content if you feel like it or post it as is. The rest is always up to the visitors.
The above factors play an important role in creating SEO-friendly content. But there is definitely no hard and fast rule for SEO since this is extremely dynamic by nature. It keeps changing with technology and time. So you must stay alert about the trend in order to be able to retain the popularity in search results.