How to Create SEO Friendly Content in 2020

Creating SEO-friendly content is important for both users and search engines. It often takes much time and effort, but the result was not slow to arrive. The negative side of this is that many marketers consider that SEO-friendly content needs to be stuffed with keywords, but, in reality, it should help search engines better understand, find, and rank it high in the search.

If you want to keep your readers interested and engaged, you should need to consider the structure of your content, write interesting content, and grasp readers’ attention by providing eye-catching headlines, subtitles, and clear paragraphs. Once people start liking, commenting and sharing your article, that will increase your search rankings.

So, if you want to improve your rankings, start improving your writing skills. Plain and simple, isn’t it? I hope the following SEO rules will help you write SEO-friendly blog posts and get your ranking better in search engines.

1. Find Your Target Keywords

When search engines crawl webpages, they want to understand the context of your pages and include or not in their indexing process. To help them speed up this task, you need to find the right keywords and mention them in your writing copy. This is one of the best ways to dominate the search results and satisfy your readers.

Once you start identifying relevant keywords in your niche, make sure to include them into your titles, subtitles, meta descriptions, ALT tags and within your content. It’s also important to look for long-tail keywords, even if they have a low search volume, they will give a high possibility to rank higher on the SERPs. Make sure to understand the search intent behind keywords you want to use.

When conducting keyword research, you can use the following resources to find the right keywords:

• Use keyword suggestion tools like SE Ranking or Answer The Public to find the best keyword variations.

• Use Quora to figure out what industry-related topics people discuss and find new keyword variations.
• Amazon is one more great resource to detect transactional keywords.

• Monitor your main competitors and check out what keywords are providing the most traffic.
• Google’s Related Searches and Autocomplete help you identify the keywords that people are really looking for.

• Look for topic-related threads on different industry forums.

Once you find and create a list of your target keywords, make sure to include them in the right places and in a natural way. Avoid overusing keywords as it can hurt your content readability.

2. Create Eye-Catching Titles

Compelling headlines play a crucial role in SEO and user-friendliness. This is the first thing that people see in the search while looking for something. To grab their attention, focus on writing descriptive and attractive titles that can help users and search engines better understand what your page is about.

Moreover, well-structured titles can help newsletter subscribers define whether they need to open and read your email. Titles are an important on-page SEO factor that you should take into consideration to build the audience’s curiosity, establish trust, and show a benefit of your headline.

While creating great titles, make sure to do the following:

• Include a target keyword in your titles and keep it around 60 characters;
• Use odd numbers and parentheses;
• Try to describe your headline accurately;
• Add emotional modifiers like “best”, “free”, “how-to” and many more to your titles.

Once you create your titles, you can use CoSchedule to check out its overall score and identify possible grammar mistakes and readability. If you want to generate more clicks, you can try A/B testing and figure out which title results in higher results.

3. Create SEO-friendly URLs

According to Backlinko, URLs are a very important ranking factor. Building SEO-friendly URLs can improve user experience and provide an easy opportunity to share with others. They play a significant role in SEO optimization.

To take advantage of your URLs, make sure to follow these rules:

• Add a target keyword to your URLs. It will help you increase website visibility in search and better categorize your web pages.
• Include hyphens to each word. For example, webpagetemplates.org/blog/how-to-write-seo-friednly-content.
• Create short and simple URLs and avoid using stop words like an, but, a, and or.
• Try to stick to three to five words and delete unnecessary words.
• Use lowercase letters.
• Avoid keyword repetition.

If you want to maximize your SEO efforts, ensure to build URLs by keeping in your mind these simple rules. Just be simple, readable and short and you will get success.

4. Optimize Your Images

Images are important for your content as they make it easy to read and shareable. People don’t like reading plain text, they are more likely to read content that has more beautiful and relevant images. It’s essential to include them in your content and optimize them properly for search engines.

Here are some tips on how to optimize images for your content:

• Avoid using too large images as they can slow down your load time.
• Add ALT text to tell what your image is about.
• Include a target keyword in your ALT text.
• Name your images files instead of using meaningless characters.
• Create high-quality, relevant and unique images.
• Avoid stealing them from other resources.

Everything is essential for your content. If you have a strong and relevant image that supports your articles, you can build trust among your audience and increase the number of clicks.

5. Add Relevant Links to Your Content

Creating high-quality content is important to include a lot of external and internal backlinks to support your points and drive traffic for your older content. It makes your content stronger and increases the validity of your website as you show some authority on your topic. Link structure is essential, especially if you want to rank higher in Google.

Adding relevant links to your content helps search engines and people find the best articles, make your readers spend more time on your website, and cut down your bounce rate. The better links you use, the higher your web page will rank in Google. Moreover, including trusted resources into your copy add value and build trust with your readers.

You can check out any page on Wikipedia that is a great example of using external and internal links to let people ease user navigation and improve user experience. Avoid using too many links and stick to a reasonable number of them. Make sure that they are natural, relevant and valuable for people.

6. Use the Optimize Length of Your Articles

A typical blog post includes a minimum of 300 to 500 words. Right now Google prefers long articles that are easy to read and have a lot of useful information for readers. It might seem that long articles can make people leave long posts, but longer content tends to get more shares, mentions, and links in social media. Moreover, longer content can get a high chance of ranking higher in search results.

According to Backlinko, the optimal length should be around 1500 – 2000 words. Make sure that writing longer posts are important, but the quality is more important than quantity. There is no sense to create a long post if you don’t add any value to your content.

The main goal of such posts is to answer user’s questions and provide your readers with the most useful information. You can check out your analytics and figure out which articles get the most clicks and views and find the ideal length for your content.

7. Optimize Content for Mobile Devices

According to Statista, the number of mobile users is expected to reach 3.5 billion in 2020. So, optimizing content for mobile is a must, especially if you want your mobile site to rank higher in the search results. It’s important to create a responsive website design and adapt it for your desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.

You can use accelerated mobile pages to create content as it can help you speed up your web pages and improve user experience. Try to build a simple layout and navigations to help users easily find all the necessary information.

Once you create a mobile-friendly website, you can check out any possible issues using the SE Ranking Website Audit. The tool identifies all possible mistakes, including speed, mobile optimization, content, etc, and gives actionable recommendations on how to improve your web pages and fix issues properly.

8. Implement Schema Markup

Using schema markup for your content can help search engines better understand your content. You can break down each part of your content and show search engines what these parts are. I recommend using Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper to include schema markup into your content. If you want to add structured data to your titles, make sure to select “Articles”, enter your URL and start tagging.

Then, underline your title in the left panel, select the type of schema markup and create HTML. Just copy this code and insert it for your blog post.

Bottom Line

Creating SEO-friendly content is important for both search engines and readers. The better they can understand your web page, the higher your chances are ranking in the search results. Quality content tends to get more shares, links, tweets and mentions to your website.

Surely, it takes some time to create SEO-friendly content for your website, but it will give results in the long run. I hope that these tips mentioned above can help you drive traffic and value for your SEO efforts and create super useful articles.