Agreed; but first of all, what does ‘SEO friendly content’ mean; as also, how to create such content?
Well, to be precise, SEO friendly content means content that can be easily assimilated by SE or Search Engines. In fact, the better they can assimilate your content, greater will be your chances of gaining higher ranking in their search results.
However, several factors, such as introduction, uniqueness, post title, body text, internal linking structure, appearance, authorship and images count a lot in creating SEO friendly content.
Now that the issue has been clarified, let’s get into the next part – how to create SEO friendly content.
Here are some of the steps that you need to take towards creating SEO friendly content that will also prove useful for your readers
Step 1 – Make your content unique and original
Unique and original does not necessarily mean that you need to write masterpieces like “The Old man and the Sea” (by Earnest Hemingway) or “Moby-Dick” (by Herman Melville). It merely means that your text should not be an absolute copy from any other website or online source.
Incidentally, Google is very efficient in detecting copied or duplicate content, making no bones about imposing penalty by lowering down the ranking. However, there are two major types of duplicate content that Google is very much concerned about. The first is a site that lists the very same page number of times with a few words changed and is usually attempted to gain higher rank on a wide range of keywords, often considered unrelated to the site.
The second type revolves round affiliate programs. Even though affiliate programs themselves do not cause concern for Google, yet what irritates Google is the practice of an affiliate program to take a template and then offer it to its base of affiliates to use.
However, it is always better to check the uniqueness of your content by using Copyscape Premium Service. All you have to do is simply copy and paste your text directly into the search box when Copyscape Premium will search and display any copied matter, if found.
Step 2 – Create well-structured post title
The title of a post proves crucial for a number of reasons, while well-structured titles will greatly help
- Users know whether to click and read or reject
- Search engines to know what the page is all about
- Newsletter subscribers to know if it is an email they need to open
- Ad systems to decide whether the page is worth an ad or not
- Matters relating to on-page SEO issues
Step 3 – Take care of your Intro
Search engines, in course of crawling a webpage intend to figure out fast about what they are looking for as well as determine whether to include it in their results. You can jolly well help in the process by way of putting your keywords in an introductory form of paragraph at the starting of the page. Even though many ignore this important issue, studies reveal that such tactics prove effective in creating better SEO friendly content.
Step 4 – The same applies to the body of the page
We are well aware that unique and freshly updated content is considered as SEO friendly. But very little has been the verdict on the body of the content. While some are in favor of mile long content (advocates of more the merrier idiom), others prefer shorter ones. Nevertheless, the debate rages between 700 and 300 words on an average. Of course, highly technical or controversial content may become longer in order to accommodate such themes.
Also important is the use of Italics and bold wherever found suitable. Another body style, now considered obsolete is the use of CAP and SMALL CAP at the beginning of a page. It used to look like CONTENT.
Step 5 – Interlinking is essential for SEO
Internal linking is the technique of Search Engine Optimization to link one post to another in such a manner that increase blog or website’s usability to the readers and provide them more relevant content to read. In other words, internal link building or internal linking is the process of connecting one page/post of a website to another page/post with relevant information by means of a hyperlink. In this case, both the source domain and the target domain remains the same.
Step 6 – Use images freely, but optimize them also
Images turn boring content into interesting stories. Also, searchers confronting serious text become greatly relieved at finding photos and illustrations depicting the theme. Moreover, we all know that “A picture is worth a thousand words”. However, best practices for presenting images in your content include the following:-
- Refrain from using stock photos
- Use images only when you own or buy the copyright
- Use ALT text to describe the image; crawlers can not read images
- Go for appropriate image file name instead of numerical.
Postscript
SEO friendly content writing, incidentally, should never be aimed at serving the search engines, rather should be aimed at serving the visitors that come to your website and read your content. If you happen to have the option of choosing between a technique that is good for your visitors but not so very good for search engines or vice versa, choose the one that’s good for the visitors. Search engines eventually intend to provide content that is informative-cum-interesting for their customers also.