10 tips to create SEO friendly content for your Website or Blog

The foremost thought one should keep in their mind while writing for SEO (search engine optimization) is that the web page is for the people and not for search engines. It’s all about what words, titles and heading are used to get people’s attention, so that the readers can easily find it when they search for something like for example on Google. I mean, who has time to put an effort to look up for things. It can be challenging, but thou shall not fear my friend as these few tips can help you achieve the goal.

1. Write Relevant Content

Don’t fool around!! It will eventually be found, it’s always better to stick to your topic and the relevance. People are not fooling you see and if you are caught, it will only bring down your rank or worse, you can be banned, well we don’t want that. Also try to link your content to work which have been done previously.

2. Content should be organic and unique

That does not mean that you say something new, all it means that it should be fresh and not a copy paste from another source. Open your horizon, be friendly and funny, whatever suits you. Use words that do not require an Oxford dictionary because it’s no English class. Choose the words that will appeal to the readers, the longer they stay the better for your site.

3. Must Include Images and Alt tag

Seriously, who likes a dull and boring page, catchy images play an important/essential role in making SEO friendly, haven’t you heard that people are more visual, but don’t just put up a random picture, the image should have some relevance to the content. Using different fonts can have a remarkable effect as well (beautify the text) but DO NOT overdo it, no one wants a web page which looks like a school project. Bonus point try to select an optimal size for all your images. Too large images make the page becoming slow to load, thereby damaging your SEO.

Alt text is called alternative text, also known as “alt attributes”, “alt descriptions,” and are used within an HTML code to describe the appearance & function of an image on a page. Search engine does not read images without alt tags,So for search engine crawling its better to include “alt tags”.

4. Don’t forget to link!

Make sure to include external links to 3rd party source and internal links which points to other related important articles in your blog or website, by doing this we can pass some better link juice from one link to another.
External links makes your piece of content more relevant,appear authoritative, and therefore results in better seo results, and your reader will find you more trustworthy too.The above image from Moz.com shows that linking to your own website is less valuable than linking to completely external sites, as it shows authority to what you’re saying, and search engines look to promote the most reliable content.

5. Basic Structure of Project

Every post should contain the following:-

1. Introduction (just let people know what the post is about).
2. A body which should contain the message you are trying to convey. This is important as to help your readers to understand the main idea behind your post.
3. Conclusion (try to be smart about this tricky part because this is the part which leaves the impression on the reader’s). if the readers like your write up they are more likely to follow you on various social media platforms.

6. Length of the content

Remember, it’s not a straight jacket formula, but in my opinion an ideal content would be anywhere from 500- 1000 words. Anything less than 500 words won’t do any good for your SEO and similarly if you overdo it (more than 1000 words) then the reader might lose interest in reading it all. So, maintaining somewhere between 500–1000 is your best bet.

Source: Buzz Sumo

7. Use keywords

Personally, it’s always better to sort your keywords first because if you are ready with your keywords the job is already half done so when you sit down to write you can use these keywords in the titles, headers, and main text with 1–2% density per keyword in whole content. Breaking your post into smaller paragraphs with headlines makes it more appealing to the reader. If your post is not organized, it can easily be lost no matter how great the contents are.

Researching new keywords may sound time taking, and you may believe you know what keywords are relevant, however, as this graph from Moz.com shows, using the right keywords can boost your website’s traffic from 10 to millions.

8. It Should be Shareable

Imagine a post which one would want to share with their friends, but to their horror, there is no sharing option, won’t that be disappointing. INDEED!! Do Not Sweat there are numerous websites that make it easy to add social media buttons to your post like — Addthis

So make your content available to be shared on relevant platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Reddit etc.

9. Review your Quality of Information

ON- Well, it’s simple if your post quality is better than the rest it will rank up as obviously it will be more helpful to the readers. All you need to do is to convince them that your content would benefit them more than the rest. The best way to do this is to be authentic while providing details.

To make sure your web content is noticed for the right reasons, make sure your grammar, spelling and facts are spot on.

I know, that there are lots of other factors that play an important role, but it won’t do you any harm if you could just recheck before putting it online. Just read it again. Not only with your brain, but also with your eyes.

10. SEO Tools to Optimize Content

There are many tools available to make your content SEO optimized. Some of them are Hemingway Editor, Read-able, Essay Mama, Plagtracker, Keyword density checker, Keyword Planner. You can use any of these and get started.

TYPES OF SEO CONTENT

The following are the few types of SEO content:-

1. Blogs- It’s almost like an online journal, adding new material to a regularly updated website or web page and is easy to write as well as its more like a conversational style.
2. Articles- This is the kind of content you find in a magazine, newspaper style of web pages featuring interviews, news articles etc.
3. Product pages- this one basically cover the retail e-commerce kind of websites
4. Videos or Slideshows- Well, humans are visual, therefore; a video or series of images have a more prolonged effect and are more convincing.

Your Turn
So now you know the basics so go out there, it’s your turn now. SEO friendly content writing is no rocket science just follow the above tips and you are good to go. If you follow these basic fundamentals in your post it can actually help you improve your search engine ranking and will surely increase your website traffic. Just write like a regular human and I hope the above tips help you write your content which is smart, funny, interesting and relevant to your website and shows up remarkable results (fingers crossed).

Originally published at SeoGuruji — Narender Rawat.