Producing SEO-friendly content allows you to grow your business without increasing your marketing budget. Plus, if you want your business to thrive, it’s essential that you make sure you write SEO-friendly content.

In fact, writing SEO-friendly content that is also appealing to your readers is one of the biggest challenges you’ll face if you’re just starting out in content marketing.

When writing SEO-friendly content, apart from topic selection, you need to keep in mind several factors like a comprehensive SEO checklist that needs to be followed.

The most important thing about SEO-friendly content writing is to keep in mind that you are writing for people, not for search engines, which is why it also allows you to expand your audience from your website.

And for that, your content must solve a particular problem of your audience. The more relevant your content is and the better it solves the problem of your target audience, the better you will be ranked.  Search engines reward sites with relevant and quality content.

But you also need to make sure that you have used good SEO techniques to get the best possible ranking in the SERPs. In this article, we’ll look at some crucial tips for writing SEO-friendly content that will help you rank higher in search engines.

What Is SEO-Friendly Content?

SEO-friendly content is content that is written in such a way that it helps search engines understand what it is about, what user queries it answers, and what people will learn from your content.

 Content that best meets all of these criteria is favored by search engines and will be displayed for relevant user queries in the top results, which brings many benefits to your sites, such as traffic and audience growth. Creating SEO-friendly content can be cheaper, more sustainable, and sometimes more effective than paid advertising.

What Are the Main Types of Content to Optimize for SEO?

Product Pages:

A product page is a page on a website that describes a particular product or service. A good product page while playing a role in convincing your customer to make a purchase, can serve as both SEO content and a PPC landing page.

Product pages are usually presented in text form to display the relevant information of a product or service but many companies use videos or demos to present these facts.

Blog Posts:

 Blog posts are one of the easiest ways to create a steady stream of effective SEO content. You can use them to write quality articles that will help you build a reputation as an industry leader.

Blog posts can therefore be a great way to build your site’s authority. Moreover, blogs are very flexible and you can use them to host any type of content.

Articles:

Articles are the main type of content you can find on most newspaper or magazine-type websites in the form of a news article, an interview, or a feature story.

Lists:

Lists are actually a type of article, presented in a list format to make it easier to read. Lists are also easier to click on when they appear in search results or social media feeds.

Lists are very popular with people whether in the form of a magazine article or a blog post especially when the title of the article or post starts with a number. In order for people to find the list interesting, you need to make it as detailed as possible.

Guides:

 Guides are a type of content that is highly sought after by people that is longer and explains in detail how to do something. Guides give you the opportunity to explain things in detail and give advice to your audience which can therefore add a lot of SEO value and be a good way to generate leads.

If the guide you are presenting is very long you can publish a summary or an excerpt, asking visitors to fill out a registration form to read the full guide.

Videos:

Videos can be a great way to attract and reach an audience. In fact, videos account for the majority of media consumption and web traffic, as they are more engaging than any article or infographic.

Infographics:

Infographics are large-format images that contain a lot of data in the form of graphs or charts on a single topic. Infographics allow people to read the information that they can process more easily because they are graphic snapshots of information that would have required a few thousand words to express in article form.

Infographics are also more likely to be shared by people, which gives them a chance to go viral and be a real source of backlinks.

Glossaries:

A glossary is an alphabetical list of terms in a particular area of knowledge with definitions of those terms. A well-designed glossary can be a good way to capture search traffic if you work in a specialized area.

How to Write SEO-Friendly Content?

To help search engines find, understand, and connect your content to the topic you’re trying to cover, in other words, to make it SEO-friendly, you need more techniques than just using keywords in your articles, videos, and other forms of content.

Below we’ll go over some important tips for creating SEO-friendly content:

1- Conduct Keyword Research for Your SEO-Friendly Content

Keyword research is one of the most important steps if you want to write SEO-friendly content! In fact, each of your contents is considered a web page in terms of search engine ranking that you can optimize with specific keywords.

Keyword research consists of using keywords your target audience inserts in search engines. You should focus on long-tail keywords. The particularity of long-tail keywords is that they have a lower search volume but on the other hand give you the remarkable possibility to get a good ranking in the SERPs.

You can also do some research on Google to find out what keywords your competitors are ranking for.

• Hummingbird algorithm update

 Optimizing your content for search engines is not just about placing the right keywords in the content. Google with the Hummingbird algorithm update on September 26, 2013, no longer follows a keyword-only approach.

Google by announcing Hummingbird marked its commitment to an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the intent of Internet users’ queries, with the goal of providing them with more relevant results.

• Semantic search and the knowledge graph

Hummingbird has had the greatest impact on search engine functionality with respect to semantic search and the knowledge graph (a set of SERP features designed to provide quick and accurate answers to users’ questions about people, places, and things).

This is what allows Google, by taking context and meaning into account, to determine that the search results reflect the user’s intent and adequately meet their needs, even when the user’s intent is implied.

This means that you should focus instead on topics that match the meaning of the terms users are searching for.

• Latent semantic keywords (LSI keywords)

 If you want your article to be SEO-friendly, consider semantic research by using latent semantic keywords (LSI keywords), i.e. synonymous and related keywords, in your content.

Semantic search optimization goes far beyond a keyword and provides the most meaningful answers to search queries in the form of quality and detailed content.

You must use your keyword naturally and repeatedly in your content. Again, you can take advantage of LSI keywords, by inserting them into your content.

You can try Jaaxy  here for free to find the best long-tail keywords 

 Read More: Jaaxy Keyword Research Tool Review

2-Choose SEO Friendly Title for Your Content

Using the right title tags is another important aspect of SEO content because the title is a fundamental element in the searches made by search engines.

The use of titles and subtitles, in addition to being a way to use keywords in your content, makes your text easier to read for your readers as well as for search engine spiders.

It is through your title that search engines will understand the context of your article. Titles allow them to better understand your content and determine the most important parts. Also, people are more likely to share easy-to-read information.

The choice of the keyword in your title that corresponds to the context of your content has a crucial impact in the ranking of your content. Remember that for titles, there is a limit of characters and pixels that you must not exceed in the SERPs, otherwise your title will be cut.

Pro tip:

• The title of your content must be less than 66 characters long.
• Your title should contain long-range keywords while being clear and direct, especially in an H1 tag.

Be sure to use plenty of subtitles or H2 tags (as well as H3, H4, etc.). For the subtitle, you can use an H2 tag, then an H3 tag, and so on.

Using good title tags for effective SEO-friendly content is primordial especially when you are writing long content. Inserting some of your keywords and LSI keywords in your subtitles is also beneficial for SEO.

3. Make Your URL SEO Friendly

The presence of keywords in URLs is not a determining factor for ranking, but search engines will take into account the keyword inserted in the URL because writing a URL that clearly describes the content of the page can help your readers understand what it contains.

Try to choose SEO-friendly URLs like https://www.domain.com/your title with keywords.

4. Meta-Description

The meta description (MD) is the text that is typically used by Google to display text results in the second and third rows of search results, below the TITLE.

Meta descriptions play a major role in search engine rankings and are ideal places to place your keywords. It’s important to make sure your meta description is well written and attractive.

By optimizing the meta descriptions of your content, you ensure that every piece of content you write has the potential to generate maximum traffic to your site.

Writing a good description in 140-160 characters long, that explains what your content is about in an engaging way so that readers will want to check it out while using long-tail keywords can increase your CTR (Click-Through-Rate).

5. Optimize Your Images for SEO

Don’t forget that in SEO-friendly content, images play a very important role because they can make your content interesting and shareable. Also, make sure to optimize the size of the images.

Images that are too large slow downloading time and hurt SEO. Make the image as small as possible without compromising visibility or quality.

You can optimize images also by adding keywords to image files and providing ALT tags. When naming an image, make sure the name is related to the image itself and use keywords in the alt text of your image.  This is what helps search engines understand the content of an image

6. Optimize Your Content-Length

keep in mind that Google gives higher priority to longer, higher quality content because Google’s goal is to provide its users with the best possible answers, which often translates into articles that provide the most complete answer to the user’s query.

A recent study by Brian Dean[1] showed that the average number of words in a Google first page result is 1,447 words.

In fact, the reason that content length is clearly linked to higher search engine rankings is that, as a general rule, longer content deals with more in-depth topics than shorter content.

But if your content fulfills an interesting search intent, it can rank well even if it’s short.

In addition, longer content has a higher probability of getting quality backlinks, which contributes significantly to improved search engine rankings.

 The graph below illustrates the correlation between content length and backlinks.

Source: Hubspot

In order for your content to be truly SEO friendly, you need to make sure that what you are writing is not only worth a cursory glance, but that it is appreciated by users looking to explore the type of information you are developing!

Try to create quality content that is engaging, informative, and detailed. It is therefore imperative to avoid writing superficial content in incredibly complex technical jargon.

Pro Tip :

• Use your keyword in the first 100 words of your content.
• The longer your content is, the more likely you are to rank well.
• Search for your target keyword in Google and you’ll see a section titled “people also ask.”

Choose the questions that match the intent of your content and answer them in your content. This way you can ensure that your SEO-friendly content answers the questions people are looking for.

7. Add Links to Your Content

When you write new content, linking to old content makes your readers stay longer on your site which improves the navigability of your site and reduces the bounce rate, another important factor for SEO.

By creating internal links to your previous content you not only add value and information for your readers and make your content SEO friendly, but you also create a link structure that will make it easier for search engine crawlers to understand your entire site.

When linking to other content using anchor text be sure to quote the title of the article with the main keywords of the article you are linking to.

The more links to your previous content, the more search engines like Google will appreciate and highlight your content. But instead of creating internal links indiscriminately, take advantage of this internal linking strategy to direct your readers to articles where they can get more in-depth details on terms related to your main topic.

 External links to quality, reputable websites increase the validity of your own content. The better the links, the higher your page will rank in search results. In addition, using credible sources in the body of your text builds trust with your readers.

Another important factor by which search engines rank content is the number of backlinks it gets. Good content tends to get a lot of backlinks.

Read More: 12 Best Ways to Get Backlinks

8. Use Social Sharing Buttons

Using social share buttons is important because it sends social signals to search engines, increases brand exposure, and also traffic to your website. In addition, it improves the user experience.

9. Make Sure Your site is Mobile-friendly

Google’s “mobile-friendly” algorithm now gives a huge boost to the ranking of mobile-friendly websites, as nearly half of all users who play online come directly from mobile devices.

It is also important that you make sure that your website has no speed issues and is impeccably fast. You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to check if your site has any speed issues.

10. Use Google Search Console

Google Search Console is an essential tool to improve your SEO and has many advantages such as:

• Helps you discover which keywords are driving traffic to your website.
• Gives you notifications of crawl errors, such as broken pages, so you can take care of the problem.
• Checks your website’s link profile
• Checks your site’s mobile-friendliness
• Allows you to use the disavow tool to send a list of any backlinks you don’t want Google to consider when analyzing your site
• Create structured data for your pages
• Submit and verify a sitemap
• Desegregates site links
• Presents rich maps to enhance the mobile experience

Google Search Console shows you also the impression and click-through rate of each of your pages which helps you do A/B testing by modifying your title tags and meta descriptions, etc. to see the result and draw your conclusions.

11. Update Your Content Regularly

To keep your website consistently attractive and high converting, you need to write content and update it regularly. Your frequently updated website provides search engines with new content and sources of new information for their search queries. 

This is because Google wants to provide searchers with the best results for their search queries. Search engines love websites with quality content and updated frequently.

The more you update your website with articles, downloads, and new web pages, the more search engines will stop visiting your site, and the more opportunity you have to rank higher based on the content you provide.

So with each update to your site, the search engine changes the ranking of your site.  On the contrary, if you don’t publish regularly, search engines don’t consider your blog as a good resource for searchers.

So, if you want to increase the chances of your website getting a higher ranking, update the content frequently so that the search engine re-evaluates your position in its index.

12. Include Schema Markup

Schema markup is code in a microdata format that you place on your website to help search engines understand the meaning of your content and return more informative results to users.

It breaks down each part of your publications and tells search engines what those parts mean. Schema markup allows your website to rank higher for all kinds of content types. You can use Google’s structured data markup helper to easily add a markup to your content.

Conclusion

I hope you found the tips mentioned in this content helpful. You now know that in order to rank well in SERPs and get more organic traffic, you need to write your content in accordance with these regularities to satisfy both users and search engines.

 By implementing these techniques, you’ll be able to create SEO-friendly content and improve your company’s visibility in search engine rankings, regardless of the industry you write in.

Once you’ve applied these techniques, take a look at your Google Analytics reports and see which articles are generating the most engagement for you. Which ones are getting the most visits and which ones are being read the longest.

But remember, the best way to get people to read and engage with your content is to write quality, informative content.