If you want your content to help your website reach a high rank in the SERPs, you have to optimize it for SEO. SEO-friendly content, however, requires a lot of time and effort. But if you follow a strategic plan, you can easily create well-optimized, unique content.
There is a common misconception that SEO-optimized content can’t be user-friendly. The truth is that well-optimized, high-quality content improves your search engine ranking opportunities as it facilitates the users. It’s a two-in-one package.
Here are some strategic tips that will help you to create SEO-Friendly content. So, let’s dive in!
13 Tips to Create Unique and SEO-friendly Content
1. Structure Your Content Well
It is important to follow a unique structure when creating content. Start by identifying your main point. By dividing it into different parts, you’ll be able to write faster and more effectively. Once you structure your content, you can work on each part separately without wasting time organizing your thoughts.
Each article should include an introduction, main body, and conclusion. The body can be divided into different parts and written in a way that properly covers the topic and resonates with your audience.
One thing that people may miss is to make the most of their conclusion. You should ensure that your content ends with a compelling call to action. For example, if you create a guide about West Coast Shipping, discuss different steps to ship a car and add a compelling call to action in each step.
2. Write Catchy Titles
Your web page’s title is important for SEO purposes and user-friendliness.
Using descriptive and catchy titles, you can help readers understand what your blog post is about and how they will benefit from reading it.
Here are some things that you can follow to come up with good titles:
- Adjust your focus keyword in your title
- Try and fit your title in 60 characters. That way, it will show up fully in the results since Google only displays the first 60 characters.
- Make the title according to the content featured in the post.
Using CoSchedule, you can check the overall score of your title. In addition to analyzing grammar and readability, the tool also shows a title length. Furthermore, you can preview your Google Search result and email subject line.
In your titles, you can include emotional modifiers such as “best,” “amazing,” “funny,” “free,” “how to,” “surprising,” and so on to hook your audience.
For many people, it can be difficult to come up with catchy titles on their own. Fortunately, several online tools can help in this process. For one, you can use title-generating tools and get some inspiration. However, the hitch with these tools is that they tend to get a little repetitive…and nonsensical, if not repetitive.
Paraphrasing tools can also be a good solution here. If you feel as if your title is a tad too boring, you can have it paraphrased.
A paraphrasing tool essentially takes the entered content and changes it by replacing words with their synonyms and by altering sentence structures. If you opt for one that works on intelligent AI-based algorithms, the tool’s changes will help enhance the overall quality of the provided text…which will be the title in our case.
This is something that you have to be a little careful about when picking a paraphraser. Not every one of them works smartly, so be sure to give your selected one a couple of test tries before using it on your titles.
3. Create SEO-Friendly URLs
Creating well-crafted URLs is among the most important aspects of SEO-friendly content.
In addition to providing better user experiences, they are also easier to share.
The following rules should be followed when creating SEO-friendly URLs:
- Make sure the URL of each page includes the targeted keyword. Search engines can categorize and identify your page more effectively if you do that.
- Remove unnecessary words and shorten the URLs as much as possible (they should be 4-5 words long)
- Use hyphens to separate words in the slug e.g. http://website.com/how-to-online-content
- Don’t use uppercase letters in the URL. Some servers might redirect you or give you a 404 error if you use uppercase letters
- Avoid the use of as a, an, but, and or
- Make your URLs simple and keyword-enriched
4. Arrange Your Content with Headings Tags
If you want your content to be completely SEO-friendly, you must ensure that it contains proper heading tags. There shouldn’t be any misused header tags.
An h1 tag should appear only once on a blog post’s title and contains the target keyword. An h2 tag should be used for the main sections, while an h3 tag should be used for subsections.
5. Write Small and Concise Paragraphs
Make sure that your paragraphs are as short as possible. At max, you should keep each paragraph at 3 – 5 lines. This will make your content easy to read and less intimidating.
Change your font, add bullet points, highlight text, and use different formatting options. As a result, mobile users will be able to read your content more easily, and your content will be more interesting.
6. Create Keyword-enriched Metadata
In search results, Google shows the meta description beneath your title as a content summary. To encourage readers to click on your blog post, it is important to make it appealing and informative.
You should use your target keywords and explain your article in the meta description. An ideal meta description length is between 155 and 160 characters.
The original meta description will not be guaranteed to appear in the search results.
Thus, you should figure out your target keyword and include it naturally. If your website isn’t WordPress-based, you can use any online tool to create well-structured meta tags for your content. Thus, you should figure out your target
7. Optimize Images
It is important to include and optimize images in your content to effectively convey your points and improve your reader’s experience. The process of optimizing images is similar to traditional search engine optimization.
While Google Images cannot read the text in images, it can interpret the content of images to determine which images are relevant to a search. This is done thanks to the Alt text. In addition to the Alt text, you should provide descriptive titles, captions, and filenames.
Alt texts will appear instead when images aren’t loaded on a device. Use your core keywords appropriately and naturally in your Alt text.
8. Don’t Forget to Add Links
Whenever you write a new blog post, include some words, statistics or points that could provide further clarification. You should not refrain from adding internal and external links to your article. While staying focused on the main point, they allow your readers to explore a topic more deeply.
The purpose of internal linking is to help search engines understand the relevance of your content, increase reader engagement, and lower bounce rates. Linking to useful external resources will help build trust and improve user experience.
Additionally, you should add descriptive anchor text to the links so people can understand them links. Make sure you use a reasonable number of links. For example, you can add 2 – 3 of them in an article of 1,000 words.
9. Be Cautious About Content-Length
Blog posts should have a minimum word count of 300 to 500 words. It is because Google likes longer content and tends to receive more likes and mentions on social media. Thus, longer posts are more likely to rank higher in search results.
Around 2,000 words are the ideal length for content. Writing 2,000 words should not be your primary goal. The most important thing you need to do is provide your readers with useful and informative content based on their search intent. So, even if you manage this in 1,000 words, you’re good to go.
High quality overshadows high quantity. Look at what top-ranking content gets the most views and analyze how content length impacts the number of views.
10. Content Proofreading
Everyone, even expert writers, can make mistakes and errors. It’s normal, and it has to be taken in stride.
Therefore, whenever you want to write some content, make sure that you proofread it properly afterward. This will help you find and fix the errors you may have unknowingly made.
Depending on the type of imperfections that you may find during the proofreading phase, there are several different tools that you can use to fix them. For example, if there are a lot of grammar errors in the content, you can use a punctuation and grammar checker to get rid of them. If the readability is too high, you can use a readability checker to find the exact issues.
If, on the other hand, the content looks bland in places, you can try paraphrasing it. We did discuss paraphrasing earlier on in this post. You have to make changes to the words and the sentence structures.
You can either do this or use a paraphrasing tool for the same purpose. Many such tools are available online, and you can pick whichever suits you best.
As we discussed earlier, Paraphrase tools make changes to the content so that it looks different but conveys the same meaning as its original form. They can help make your content look more lively and engaging.
11. Update Your Old Posts
You should update your site content regularly, even if you create new engaging, and high-converting content. By updating your old content, you will be able to provide value to your readers, and you will also be able to keep up the stream of traffic generated by it.
Plus, going back to your old content also helps you reply to comments and check the feedback that readers leave for it.
12. Use Schema Markup
Search engines can better analyze your content if you implement schema markup. In this way, search engines can understand the meaning of each part of your publications.
You can easily add structured data markup to your blog posts using Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper. Adding schema markup to your title is as easy as choosing the right section, entering the URL, and starting tagging.
After that, highlight your title, choose the type of schema markup and create the HTML. Copy that code and replace your source code for the post with the new HTML.
13. Take advantage of SEO-Analysis Tools
SEO analysis tools are essential to write readable and SEO-friendly blog posts.
With powerful SEO tools, you can find the best-performing keywords for your content, create and submit a sitemap, check for mobile optimization, analyze your link profile, detect and disavow bad links, etc.
Conclusion:
So, there you have it.
Creating unique and SEO-friendly content isn’t difficult…if you know what steps to take. In this post, we’ve highlighted some of the major tips and techniques you can implement when writing content for your website to get a higher rank in the SERPs.
In the end, you should always remember to write your content for readers and search engines.
