The ability to write an appealing blog/article is a valuable skill. If you want to write an SEO-friendly content that will keep your users and your search engines happy, you should first take the time to think about the structure of your text and the content. By including paragraphs, headings, and subheadings to your text, the readers will have a clearer understanding of what you’re trying to share. By maximizing your writing skills, your readers will be more willing to share, like, and tweet your post.
Here are some 10 tips you should follow in order to produce content that ranks well in search:
1. Produce Unique Content
You want to craft unique content because the search engine optimization (SEO) payoff is huge. By creating unique content, your readers will value your site as an authentic and original. Search engines highly value quality offerings and this can lead to a significant boost in your present and future readers.
Although your text does not have to say something that no one has said before, it should not be an exact copy from some other website. Google can easily identify duplicate content, leading to a drop in your ranking. The more unique your content, the more readers will come back again to your site.
If you wish to check if your text is unique or not, you can use a tool such as Copyscape.
2. Do Keyword Research
Keyword research is one of the most valuable and high return activities in the search marketing niche. Performing keyword research is vital to find out what people are searching that relates to the topic of your article/blog. Incorporating the right keywords can make or break your website. In order for your website to rank well in Google, you have to research your market’s keyword demand to learn which terms and phrases target with SEO.
By using the correct keyword phrases, you will target the correct kind of traffic that goes through your website. However, by using the wrong sets of keywords, your website will attract visitors that will not contribute to your business bottom line. That is why proper keyword research lies at the heart of a successful Internet marketing campaign.
You can get this knowledge about keyword demand from research sources like:
Google AdWords Keyword Planner Tool
Microsoft Bing Ads Intelligence
Wordtracker’s Free Basic Keyword Demand
3. Use Proper Grammar and Punctuation
In order to gain more visibility in search engines, you should be strategic with your SEO techniques. This also includes proper grammar and punctuation. Correct grammar and punctuation must be part of your SEO strategy in order for your efforts to “bear fruit”.
Apart from reflecting your professionalism, error-free content is more likely to rank well in search engines. The search engines like Google are grammar sensitive and they can negatively affect your ranking. Good use of grammar helps search engines have less difficulty reading your text and gives them a better ability to grasp the message behind your content.
4. Use Paragraphs
The structure of the texts on your site is important for SEO. If your content is clearly structured, your chance to rank well in Google will be higher. Your text will go through two scanners: the readers and Google.
Before deciding to read the text, people will quickly scan your text to see what it is about. For this reason, the first paragraph is highly important as it is the first thing that catches the eye of the scanners. Make sure the first paragraph tells the main message of your post. Don’t forget to put your focus keyword in that first paragraph!
Google is your second scanner that examines the semantic closeness of your text. This refers to the proximity of related words in a text while taking into account the formatting of that text. If your text is well-structured, it will have lower bounce rates and higher chances to receive social media attention.
5. Use Headings
As previously mentioned, your readers will quickly scan your text to see what it is about. By incorporating headings into your text, the readers can scan your content and decide whether to read it or not. Google will also use them to determine what the text is about.
Apart from being important for overall readability, headings are also vital for SEO. Headings can help Google to grasp the main topic of your post and can help in your ranking. Make sure you use subheadings as well as they help readers to find their way in your text. You should also incorporate some of the keywords in the subheadings.
6. Optimize the Length of Your Text
How long does content need to be in order to work? Although there is no clear formula, some sources suggest that at least 300 words is a good minimum. Moreover, by having at least 600–700 words of content will allow you to include many variations of your keywords and provide a decent amount of information for your readers.
Make sure your text is not too long or it might scare your readers away. In addition, try to incorporate your search terms in about 1 to 2 percent of your text.
7. Use Transition Words
Transition words link words, phrases or sentences. They help the reader to progress from one idea to the next idea. Using these transition words will make your text more readable as they give direction to the readers. If you use enough transition words, your text will become easier to read. And readability affects your SEO!
For comparison, use words such as rather, while, in contrast, and for emphasizing a sentence, use words like above all, most noteworthy, certainly. And when you want to conclude your story, you can use words as hence, consequently or therefore.
8. Add Links
Make your post stronger by adding various links to your post. There are two types of links you can add: external links and internal links. External links are links from your website to another website to provide additional information for readers. On the other hand, internal links are linked in your article that links back to your website to an internal page.
Google trails websites by following links, internal and external, using a bot called Google bot. In this way, Google can determine the relationship between the various pages, posts and other content. Moreover, this is how Google can also detect duplicate content.
Internal linking is a very effective SEO tool as it helps search engines discover new pages on your website. Internal linking can assist readers with navigating around your website. And if your internal links provide content that is relevant to your readers, they are more likely to read further articles.
9. Use Images and Optimize Them
By incorporating images in your text, you can make your content more interesting and easier to read. Make sure you use images that have the necessary copyrights and make sure you optimize them.
Moreover, there are many SEO benefits of using images in your text. If you properly label images with search-friendly metadata and captions, you are creating more content for search engines to index. Your content will then show up within both web search results and images searches — that’s double the opportunity for discoverability.
10. Use SEO Tools
If you wish to work smarter and faster with SEO, you should start with having the right tools. There are many tools with a wide variety of uses and covering a number of common needs. If you are using WordPress, you can use the Yoast SEO Plugin to optimize each post and page. It offers suggestions and optimization instructions, including keyword density.
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