If you want to write for SEO, you have to understand that search engines are fussy.
You have to make sure that your content meets the requirements and conditions set by the search engine so that your website can get a boost in its SERP rank.
If you are new to SEO, you may be a bit confused about which factors and aspects to focus on in order to make your writing search engine-friendly.
Don’t worry. Moving on in this post, we will be looking at five tips that you can follow to start writing search engine optimized content.
Top 5 Tips for Writing Search Engine Optimized Content
1 Adjust Keywords Properly in The Content
Without keywords, your content will be impotent as far as SEO is concerned.
Keywords essentially help the search engine to determine the nature and relevancy of your website.
If a website has, for example, a lot of content in it with the keyword ‘best car dealers’ adjusted in it, the search engine will understand that the website has to do something with dealing with cars.
But, just using the keywords in your content is not enough. You have to make sure that you pick the ones that are relevant to your business.
And once you are done with that, you also have to make sure that you add them in the right density.
Having a high keyword density is dangerous since it can get recognized as ‘keyword stuffing’. Keyword stuffing can get your website a penalty from the search engine.
2 Add Images
Adding images is also an important step that you have to take for writing search-engine-optimized content.
There are basically two ways that adding images to your content can be helpful for your website’s SEO.
Firstly, images have a positive effect on reader engagement. Your audience will be more likely to read a post that has some nice and engaging pictures in it…as compared to a dull wall of text.
And since reader engagement has a direct effect on your site’s SEO, we can conclude that good reader engagement means good SEO.
Secondly, adding images is good for SEO since reverse-image searches are getting more and more popular nowadays.
If your blog post has some relevant images in it, chances are that it can show up in the SERPs if someone searches for an image related to your niche.
3 Make Proper Use of Headings and Sub-Headings
As we mentioned earlier, good reader engagement means good SEO.
When your website is effective in engaging readers, it means that they will stay longer on it. They may also go from page to page and explore your website.
This would eventually mean that your website would have a low bounce rate and a high amount of natural and steady traffic.
With that said, let’s look at how you can make proper use of headings and sub-headings in your content to make it search engine-friendly.
As you may have seen in various text editors and word-processing software, there are different heading styles that range from H1 to H6.
You should try and create a cascading arrangement of your content with these heading styles.
For example, you could create a title having an H1 style, and then the following sub-headings having H2, H3 and so on. This makes your content easy to navigate and more appealing to your readers.
4 Use Plagiarism Checkers to Check for Duplication
Plagiarized content can be very harmful to your website’s SEO. If Google catches your website with duplicated content, you can get penalized.
Before finalizing your article/blog post, you should check it using a plagiarism checker.
If there are any sentences or phrases in your content that match with other published sources on the internet, you can easily spot them.
Then, you can either rewrite the plagiarized bits to make them unique, or you can delete them altogether.
5 Use a Paraphraser to Make Your Content More Readable
And last but not least, you have to make sure that your content is readable. Readability plays a major role in SEO since it decides how long your visitors stay on your website, and how often they come back to read something else.
The point is, that readability does not have a direct technical effect on SEO.
However, since readability affects reader engagement, it can have a drastic indirect effect on search engine optimization.
In order to keep your content readable, you should take care of two steps. Firstly, you should be cautious when writing the draft out.
Meaning, that you should take care not to make your sentences long or to use complex words.
But, even if you are careful when writing the content, there are some chances that you could accidentally make it complicated and hard to understand.
To fix this issue, you can simply use a paraphraser.
A paraphrasing tool takes a piece of content and changes specific words in it using synonyms. However, the original meaning and context remain the same.
If there are some sentences in your content that are very hard to read, you can put them through a paraphraser to generate a simpler alternative for it instead.
Conclusion
Writing normally and writing for SEO are very different.
In the latter, you have to take care of various writing techniques such as incorporating keywords, managing readability, adding links, and so on.
In this post, we looked at five tips that you can follow in order to make your content search engine-friendly.
Let’s go over them briefly before wrapping up this post.
Firstly, you have to make sure that you use the right keywords in the right density when writing your content.
Keywords are vital for SEO content, and the latter is pretty much useless without them.
Then, you should take care to add some images to the content to make it more engaging.
You should also make use of headings and sub-headings in order to break the content down into easily perusable and navigable parts.
Plagiarism is very harmful to SEO, so be sure to use a plagiarism checker to detect duplication in your work.
And last but not least, you can use a paraphrasing tool to rewrite difficult sentences in your text and make them easier to understand.
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