Nowadays, creating great content is not always enough. Sure, you’ve crafted a very valuable source of information, but if you want to achieve greater traffic, you need to make sure that it can be easily ‘understood’ by the search engines.
When you optimize your content in a way that it’s SEO-friendly, you will get better ranking. Meaning, you are not only creating a quality content but you are also making it easier for your target audience to discover you.
Here are some of the basic must-haves on creating an SEO-Friendly content on your blog.
Draft the structure of your post
Plan first before writing. Writing is a skill many possess but not everyone can write and get the audience’s attention at the same time.
When you create a structure, you’ll have a clear path to where your content is going. This also makes your post clearer for your audience to read well.
Here are the things you should keep in mind when preparing for your structure:
Captivating introduction
You’ve probably heard in your English class that you should always start with an introduction when you are writing. Same goes for your blog.
This is the first part of your blog, make sure to capture their attention.
You don’t have put everything in the introduction just yet. First, tell something about your chosen topic subtly and show them what to expect in the coming sections of your blog.
Informative body
The body is where your post’s main message should be found. In here, you should write everything you want your audience to know about your post.
Summarized ending
A conclusion is a good way to end your blog post. This is the part where you summarize the important ideas you have shared in your post or just simply conclude about a topic you have tackled.
After listing down what you want to share on your blog in all these three sections, you can now start combining all your ideas and make your post. Read along for more info on how to properly position the points on your post.
Format your post well
Once you’re done arranging the contents of your post, you can then start writing it out. We’ve mentioned that your post should have the intro, body, and conclusion parts, right? Now, add these things below to increase its readability.
Use headings
Headings are what your readers see first. Aside from it’s bigger, it’s short and is what the next sentences are all about.
Aside from this, headings are essential for SEO purposes. When your headings contain keywords, searching it is easier and can help with your SEO ranking.
Use paragraphs
Paragraphs are essential when writing in order to avoid a clump of too many words that can be overwhelming to your audience. But keep in mind to follow the right way on when you should properly add your paragraphs and not just adding it for the sake of separating your sentences.
Use bullet points
Using bullet points is great whenever you want to list things or when you want to emphasize some things. Grammarly explained how to create powerful bullet points and showed how it can catch your reader’s attention.
Readability is one of the most important parts to keep in mind when writing a content. According to Yoast, readability is not a quick upgrade to your site’s rank. However, when people read your content and stay on your website longer, you’ll get higher conversion rate in the long run.
Create a schedule for new content
Come up with a list of blog titles and add them to your calendar. Search engines love fresh content. The more you create new posts, the more they’ll crawl your website. This will then give you a higher opportunity to rank.
Once in a while, you can try to do a bit more to your website. For instance, the “10x content” also known as the “Skyscraper Content” is a content that is ten times better than any other posts published in your niche. This content is not a walk in the park. You will be doing tons of researches and reading, but the results are going to be rewarding.
Having better and fresher content have an edge that can improve your search rankings.
Optimize the length for readability
The longer or shorter the better? Not really.
When it comes to blog posts, quality is always better than quality. You can create a 2000-word article, but without substance, there’s really nothing to it than length.
There are no limitations to how long or short your blog posts should be. In fact, Seth Godin writes blog posts that are shorter than 150 words and yet he’s one of the most popular authors out there.
But in order for it to contain some keywords and link, you can try and make 300 words as your minimum for now.
Remember that you can’t always please readers by the length of your content but rather, with the quality of your writing.
Add internal links
Internal links are those that point to your website. When a visitor reads something on your site and you provide other sources of information, you are more likely to get them to stay longer.
Don’t expect people to dig inside your blog, instead, make it easier for them.
Use a plugin
If you use WordPress as your website platform, then we recommend installing SEO plugins that are dedicated to helping you with your SEO needs.
Yoast is usually the crowd’s favorite. It has different metrics that checks if your content is SEO-friendly.
All in One SEO Pack is yet another great plugin with over 3 million downloads. It generates meta tags automatically along with other useful features.
Any of these plugins will help you assess if the contents you write on your blog are okay in SEO standards.
Conclusion
Creating an SEO-friendly content is not really time-consuming, in fact, once you’ve become adept at this, creating your future ones will be a breeze.
If you are aiming for your blog to reach a wider audience, start optimizing your content so search engines can easily find you.