Creating content for the web may be deemed as an easy and straight forward task. You may not be a pro at the topic you are writing on. Do some in depth research on it, using the internet and books, search for some facts and statistics, and write an interesting and informative article and publish it. Now you wait for the article to get views and lots of praise via the comments. However you receive less than twenty views and there are no comments. You wonder what is wrong, when your content is great and very informative. The reason is simple. Just writing content is not enough. It is quintessential that you write SEO friendly content.

read more What is SEO

The importance of using SEO friendly content

There are thousands of blog posts on a number of niches published every day. But there are just 10 results on the first page of Google search. How many times during the Google search you have found your required results in the top four or five result and how many times you had to go to the third or fourth page to get to your required information. Surely the number of former is much greater than the number of latter. So that just shows how much important it is to have a good ranking of your page so that it come among the top results in the search engine results page of SERP.

In only way to get good ranking is to write SEO friendly content. Content is definitely called the king, but the king alone cannot survive. It needs people as followers. To make people regular visitor to your page you need your page to rank high so that people will log onto your page through Google search. There on the page there must be such useful and important information so that you can make the visitor the regular by taking his email address and making him join your address book.

read more Top Mistakes Bloggers are making everyday

How to write SEO friendly content?

Here are some on page SEO rules. These steps must be taken to make your content SEO friendly.

1. Keyword research for Excellent on page SEO

The first step should be to do excellent keyword research. For keyword research use tools like Google keyword planner, MOZ keyword Explorer, long tail pro, LSI graph etc. There are a number of websites and software available that enable you to find out Keywords and their utility. One must find keywords that have high search rates and low competition. However this is very difficult and usually the easier to find keywords are low searches and high competition or low searches and low competition. Usually direct keywords have high competition. You can use long tail keywords to target specific audience.

• What are long tail keywords?

Long tail keywords are a highly specific keywords phrases according to your niche that have a low competition but they are easier to get a high rank on the SERP. One might argue that what is the use to long tail keywords when you have low searches on them. There is a big advantage. When the user is searching for common terms, it means he is just browsing for something and he can click any result on the SERP because there is no specific need in his mind but when there is a match of the long tail keyword, it means that the user will definitely click on the page that target the specific keyword phrase.

For example if the user is searching for red dresses for women, she or he might he wanting to browse through the red dresses on different websites but if the search is for red dress with black lining and fish tail, then definitely the user is ready to buy the dress.

Long tail keywords have a minimum of 3 words in the keyword phrase. It is better to make your page a mix of keywords and long tail keywords. You can use the wordtracker to find out the long tail keywords, related to your niche.

After the keyword research, you are ready to make write the SEO based title of your SEO friendly blogpost.

To get the organic traffic proper keyword research is necessary.

read more Top 10 SEO tools to make your site rank among the top

2. An SEO friendly title of your blog post

Writing a catchy title is very important. Because the one major way to attract people to your content is through a title that invokes curiosity in the users. If the title is not clear there are plenty of other posts that the user will turn to in the SERP. These are the rules that you must follow while writing a great SEO friendly title to your post.

• The title must contain the primary keyword or atleast one of the secondary ones. Many SEO guides might say that you can omit the keyword if it does not fit the flow of the title, I would say change the title and make the keyword fit the flow.
• Use modifiers in your title name. Modifiers are words that are highly rank able. For example the blog titles with a number like top 10 great smartphones or 10 best songs of 2016. Also words like top, best, review, greatest, latest, coolest are all great and boost up the SEO of your page title. More on modifiers can be read from this great and detailed article.
• The title must be clear. It is very important that you are able to show all the great aspects that the content has to offer in the short title. So be clear to the user about what they are going to get once they click on your title.
• If you are out of ideas for your articles, here is a great site that can help you to break up your writer’s block. The inbound now tool can give you great new ideas for the articles if you just enter the keywords.

• Remember on many websites where you promote your blog post only your title will be visible. If the user likes the title only then he will go to your content.
• Do not make the title very long. Google does not read the whole titles if it is long. Usually the first 70 to 80 characters are read. So it is very important that you enter the keywords in the beginning otherwise there is no use of entering the keyword anyway.
• A very popular way to write titles is to include two headings separated by -, for example seo friendly content – 18 great ways to make your content optimized for search engines, or fashion for summers – great ways to dress up to beat the heat. This will give you a great leverage to write two keywords in one title.
• Format and punctuate your title properly. Usually the first letter of each word is capitalized to make it look formal. The title must be put in h1 tags. If you are using CMS like WordPress then the titles are automatically added to the h1 headings.

Here are some great resources that tell you how to write great blog titles.

3. A URL based on SEO principles

The URL must be SEO friendly. It must not be something unintelligible. It should preferably have the complete primary keyword in it. Even if it does not, it must be based on words that are related to the article that you have written. Having a short and easy to remember URL will be great for the users to revisit the page again.

Also Read “On-page SEO practice that should be adapted“

4. Great Metadata for great SEO friendly content writing

After the title before rushing to write the content, there is one thing more that you must write. That is the metadata. Also known as the snippet. Most of the bloggers leave it because they do not know what metadata is or how it works but it is very important. Metadata is what will come up in the search results below your article title. After the title it is the metadata that will convince the user to click on your page. Because the title is limited metadata is a great way to show all the great things that your content will have for example take a look at metadata for some famous website.

You can see top sites like bornblogger have the keyword twice incorporated in their metadata but it does not look stuffed or overcrowded by proper use of metadata.

If you leave the metadata tag empty, then the search engine will use the text from the content with the title. Usually the first few lines are shown.

Now let us come to the main point. The content.

5. Writing SEO Friendly Content

read more Creating great content for your blog

As I have mentioned before too, content is the king. So making the content great, is the major responsibility of every blogger. Good content has be made noticeable and for that it must be SEO friendly content.

Tips for writing SEO friendly content

Here is a rough estimate of how much time you must spend on every part of the SEO.

Credits

• Quality of the SEO friendly content

There is no shortage of content on the web. If you write bad quality content, there are plenty of other places that the user can turn to find newer and better content. If you want to have regular returning users then it is necessary to have such top class content that your readers know that ok in this particular niche, I know  this and this blog is the authority and I must return to it get the best updates.

• Plagiarism

Plagiarism never pays you. Once you are in the blogging business, you will understand the importance of good repute and connections with other bloggers. It is essential for publicity and promotion of your blog. If you are copying someone else’ content then you do not get any good PR. People who are in the business know when they see a copied content easily. So when you have taken the time out to create a blog then you must also take out the time to write good posts also. You can also hire guest bloggers to write for your blog if writing is not something you are strong at.

Also now Google algorithm is very efficient. It will penalize you if you are caught copying content from a source. When the source catches you of their intellectual theft, they will report your page to Google, even if the algorithm overlooks your plagiarism. So if you plan to write plagiarized stuff, do know that you cannot go far with it.

• Overcrowding of Keywords

People used to overstuff their content with the keywords so that the Google algorithm considered their article as the top of the SERP. But those days are long gone. Now the search engine algorithms are very intelligent. They will penalize if an amount of text has more than the limit of keywords. A very good SEO tool is the SEO YOAST. It will tell you what is the percentage of a keyword in your article and if it is more than the specified limit it will give a red signal. So you can install YOAST to check the percentage of different keywords in the post. Just make sure you are using the keywords within the scope of the of the writing and with the flow. They are not forcefully added here and there to get you to the recommended percentage. According to yoast, I an article there can a keyword density of 2.5 percentage of the total number of words in the article.

• Length of the SEO friendly content

In the recent algorithm updates, we have come to know that Google is preferring very long posts. Posts below 300 words are not given any weightage whatsoever. And now even 500 to 1000 words articles are not given that much weightage. The new trend for popular blogposts is that of 1500 – 2000 words. Also the algorithm is intelligent enough to judge whether you have given good quality content or have just littered the page with useless stuff. Do not try to trick Google. If you want to increase the size of content just for the sake of increasing the number of words then think again because it will not increase the rank of your article.

• Adding images and videos to the content to make it SEO friendly

It is always a good idea to add images and videos to your content. Compare it with reading a thick book with words and words and no images to reading a newspaper with lots of images and headings. In the same way you can also make your content more attractive with the images and videos. But there are of course some rules. The pictures will take up some bandwidth and if you add too much media content, it can also slow down your website. When you add images always and always add alt text. That is great for SEO otherwise Google will not know what the image is about. If you are using some statics like graphs and charts ALWAYS and ALWAYS give credit where it is due. Include a URL for the source of the video and images. That is why it is important to use videos and images from reliable and well known site if you are not using your own.

read more Content management systems explained

• Formatting the content in an SEO friendly way

Proper formatting is required to increase the user readability and understandability of the content. If the article is not written in a proper way even if the content is great people will not be able to read it and leave halfway. Write the content using proper formatting. Make short paragraphs. Use bullets and headings. Make the content easily skim able in a glance. Make the content easy to read otherwise there is no use of giving too much information.

7. Interlinking to make the site more navigational friendly

Interlinking means to link the different articles in your website together with each other. This will greatly decrease the bounce rate of your website. Bounce rate means that the user leaves your webpage very quickly. When you provide the user ways to stay on your site then it will greatly decrease the bounce rate. Although make sure that the links are relative to the article and do not just add links for the sake of adding them.

8. Linking to other High authority websites articles

Only backlinks are not valuable. There is also a great value of articles that link to other high authority articles on your webpage. The benefit of these are two fold. Firstly the user trust increases in your content because they know that the content is referencing to the other high quality content on the web also. Secondly Google will give more weight to your article of it know that you are linking to high authority webpages. The secret of this type of linking is to find high authority websites in the niche you are writing on. If the webpage that you are linking to, is low in quality then the link will be of no value.

So these are the detailed and comprehensive SEO techniques that you might follow to get your content noticed by the Google algorithm. Just remember one thing, do not try to trick Google algorithm, put in some hard work and you will surely be rewarded. Creating SEO friendly content is not that difficult, once you are ready to write good quality stuff it will be very easy for you to make it SEO friendly content.

Which of these SEO techniques are most useful to write SEO friendly content in your opinion? What are your secret SEO strategies that you use in your blog posts? Let us know by commenting below.

The post SEO friendly content – 8 Greatest SEO tips that every post must follow appeared first on The Next Rex.