SEO has become the ultimate digital marketing strategy for most businesses. In this article I will provide you with a set of instructions on how to write SEO friendly content. Before we get to the how, let’s answer the what and why questions that come to mind.
What is SEO?
SEO is the process of driving more “free organic traffic” (Visitors from search engines like Google) to your website. It’s done by making the content of your website relevant to your business and what the people are searching for.
Well, Why is SEO Friendly Content so Important?
Simply because a well-written SEO friendly content can gain you more exposure, which increases your visitors and potential customers. If your article has SEO friendly content, it’s more likely to appear as the first result on a search engine, you’re more likely to be visited and it saves you money and you won’t need to spend as much on advertising.
Okay, so How Do I Write SEO Friendly Content?
I would suggest the following steps:
1. Use headlines and sub-headers
When you write a SEO friendly content, use headlines and sub-headers to make your content navigable. It increases the chances for the content to be shared. It also increases the keyword saturation and the readability of the content by search engines.
2. Add links to previous content
Linking your content to highly reputable websites will increase the validity of your website and makes your content a step closer to being SEO friendly. The higher the quality of your links, the higher your content or page will rank in the search results. For the user side of this, you can be sure that the user will trust your website more if it has those credible links.
3. Optimize the length of your article
To get the search engine’s attention and give your article a priority, your article should be of a minimum average of 500 words. While there is no Maximum limitation, it’s a great practice to keep them under 1000 words, you don’t want to bore your readers. Your keywords should be about 2 percent of the text.
If you do include an image or a video, make sure to use the relevant titles, description and alt text.
4. Choose your keywords wisely
Before you start writing your blog post or article, ask yourself, what are my golden keywords? Those keywords can be long-tail or short-tail keywords that are most significant to your business. You could use various tools like Google Keyword Planner and Google Analytics to determine the keywords that will bring you the most traffic and get an insight on the keywords quality and competition rate. You can also hire a company that provides SEO services like HiEFiCiENCi LLC. Once you determine what the best keywords are for your business, make sure to use those keywords in Titles, Headers, Tags, and the Main text.
5. Optimize your media
People are far more attracted to visit a website or view an article if it has a good-looking image. As mentioned above, it’s important to add the relevant keywords to image files titles, descriptions and ALT tags. But that’s not all that there is to the Optimization of a media file, you must optimize your image in terms of the image parameters (width and height) and the overall file size.
If a website displays an image in a placeholder of (width 700x height 500), make your image as close to that size as possible (e.g. 720 x 490). In order to optimize the size of the file, make sure when you export your image (using image editing tools like Adobe Photoshop). Keep the image resolution at 72, Quality between 60 and 70, and the image parameters in accordance to what I just mentioned above.
Remember, the bigger the size of the file, the slower it will load.
Alternatively, you can use .svg formats to keep the image’s quality and the loading speed super fast, however this method does require everything to be a vector.
6. Make your SEO friendly content shareable
Once your SEO friendly content is written perfectly, make sure that your article has the Share buttons available. Your visitors will do the marketing for you if they like your content and find it easy to share.
7. Write high-quality SEO friendly content
You may find this too obvious, yet it’s not always practiced. Make sure that what you write is not only a SEO friendly content, but also is of value to people. It should either make their life easier, entertain them or provide them with a step by step guide to solve a particular problem. Search engines reward websites that have high quality content. The quality of your content is more important than almost every other factor mentioned above. Keep in mind, you’re writing for people, so focus on engaging them.