When you consider writing from the SEO perspective, you create content that can reap long-term benefits. It can bring monthly traffic to your website, leading to more clicks, shares, likes, and engagement. SEO friendly content ranks higher in search engines. If you want your business to flourish without increasing your budget, you must consider SEO in your writing.

Though creating SEO friendly content requires plenty of time and effort. However, if you include the nine tips (discussed below), you will see them generating noticeable results at the end. You can amp this up by sending email marketing newsletters to your contacts and a good marketing funnel.

But for now, let’s stick to the topic of tips and tools to create SEO friendly content.

Things you will read in the article –

• SEO-friendly writing
• Choose your target keywords.
• Create a structure for your content
• Craft catchy headlines and sub-headers
• Craft SEO-friendly URLs
• Optimize the images
• Add relevant internal and external links
• Optimize the length of the article
• Add schema markup to your blog post

What is SEO-friendly writing?

To understand better, let’s break down the phrase into its parts:

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization) refers to optimizing or, in a much simpler term, we can say, improving a website so that people can easily find the information they are seeking via search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo.
• Content means any information and experiences present on the web in the form of blog posts, articles, guides, videos, infographics, slideshows, directories, etc., that are directed toward an audience.

So, putting these two concepts together: SEO friendly content is any content created to rank higher and attract more traffic by the search engine. SEO friendly content focuses on providing users with valuable information that answers their queries. Additionally, it means optimizing for keywords and phrases for search engines to understand your content.

8 Tips to write SEO friendly content

1. Choose your target keywords

Keyword research is about discovering words and phrases that people use to find information in search engines. Finding the right keywords will help you secure a top position in the search results and satisfy your target audience.

While choosing your target keywords, make sure you keep these points in mind-

• The search volume for the particular keyword in a given time.

• Understand the purpose of an online search for the keyword you are intent on choosing.
• Look for what keywords your competitors are ranking for—tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer, and WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool.
• Include long-tail keywords. They may have a low search volume, but they still give a high possibility of ranking on the SERPs. Try using Google Suggest, Google’s Related Searches, Quora, and LinkedIn Answers.

Once you find the target keywords, please include them in the article’s title, URL, meta description, H1-H6 tags, and alt image tags.

Include keywords throughout the content in a natural way.

Use Google Keyword Planner, SE Ranking Keyword Suggestion tool, Quora, AnswerThePublic, and SEMrush to find the best keywords. These research tools will help you create catchy titles and also increase organic traffic.

The Answer The Public tool is the easiest to use and simplest to understand. As you can see in the image below, it is a long-tail keyword tool that gives a nifty insight into the questions your target audience is typing into the search engines.

Google Autocomplete can be a very helpful keyword research tool that can provide you with search term predictions. These are based on real searches that happen on Google. Also, these predictions are related to your location and previous searches.

 

Quora is a great tool to find those niche areas and long-tail keywords.

Read the article to know how can use Quora for keyword research.

 

Also, you can try using Google Related Searches. They help you understand a user’s intent behind a search. Using the related searches, you can gain sharper customer insights so you can create valuable content.

2. Create a structure for your content

Firstly, plan on the content. Work on each part separately and structure your content. It should include an introduction, main body, and conclusion. Additionally, decide on how well you can demonstrate information through infographics, videos, images, etc. You can divide the article into different parts and write content that answers your audience’s queries. End your content with a compelling call to action for people to take the desired action

3. Craft catchy headlines and sub-headers

Writing descriptive headlines and sub-headers has a massive impact on your SEO purposes and user-friendliness.

First, it makes your writing easier to read for your audience and also for search engine robots.

Categorizing headers into H1, H2, H3, and so on would further enable recognizing your headlines and using them to understand better your content, like which parts are the most important ones.

CoSchedule is a free tool that help you write engaging headlines that are backed by data for top content marketing performance. It also shows an analysis of grammar, readability and a length of your title.

 

While you write SEO friendly content, always stick to small paragraphs.

It’s not necessary to start on a new line for each sentence. But arrange the paragraphs logically and try using different formatting options, such as bullet points, highlight text, change your font. That makes your content readable for mobile users.

4. Craft SEO-friendly URLs

As per Backlinko, URLs are an essential ranking factor. They are easy to share and provide a better user experience. Following are a few rules to craft SEO-friendly URLs-

• Include the target keyword on each page. That will result in search visibility of your website and help search engines better identify the page.
• Keep URLs short by avoiding unessential words. The average URL is around 60 characters.
• Use hyphens to separate words. For instance, https://website.com/tips-to-write-seo-friendly-content/.
• Use lowercase letters instead of uppercase letters. This can result in redirects or errors.
• Keep your URLs simple, compelling, and relevant.

5. Optimize the images

Add images to make your content engaging and shareable.

Optimize all the images by adding descriptions, keywords to the image files and providing the ALT tags.

Make sure you also optimize the image size as large-size images slow down the loading time.

6. Add relevant internal and external links

Internal links refer to those links that point from one page to another on your website. In contrast, external links are any link that points from one website to another website. Adding relevant links to your article will help visitors gain deeper insight into the topic. Linking out to helpful sources like Wikipedia will build trust and improve user experience.

No one knows the number of links you should include. But ensure that your links are relevant, natural, and valuable for readers.

7. Optimize the length of the article 

sults. Optimizing it can draw users’ attention and encourage them to click on your link over your competitors’.

Following are some recommendations to help you write catchy meta descriptions:

• Make sure you write a meta description for every page on your website. Also, make it a point to describe the specific page accurately.
• Add relevant keywords in the meta description and keep them within 140-160 characters.
•  Although there’s no such limit as to how long a meta description should be, search result snippets are designed to fit the device’s width.

• Add a call to action if it is relevant.

Adding a catchy meta description can grab the attention of new visitors and encourage them to click the link. So, add creativity and optimize the meta description tag.

8. Add schema markup to your blog post

Schema markup helps the search engine to precisely understand what your content is about and better analyze it. It divides each part of the post and explains to the search engine what each piece means.

Try Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper to add schema markup to your blog posts easily.

The Bottom Line

Hopefully, you have found this article valuable. If you follow these practical tips, you will be able to create SEO friendly content, and eventually, you will improve the SEO score. Emphasizing on creating SEO friendly content will also bring in more shares, leads, links, and repeat visitors.

Lastly, if you have any additional tricks to achieve better search engine results? Share them in the comments.

If you are planning to take up content writing as your career or simply seeking information on crafting SEO friendly content,  feel free to contact our experienced content team at Brand Imprint.