Do you want to outplay your competitors and reach Google’s Top 10? Whatever your business, your answer will be “Yes”. However, with over 200 factors Google’s search algorithm uses, how to produce the content that search engines love? Check out this step-by-step guide and get your site to rank #1.
1. Produce high-quality content
It’s not a secret that well-optimized and high-quality content allows to gain traffic and becomes a major signal for search engines to rank your website higher. How do search engines determine your content as high-quality? Check out the set of tips below:
- People should read and engage. That’s why make sure your texts are honest, not just long.
- Stick to the structure of the texts: introduction, body, conclusion.
- Add relevant content, don’t plagiarize your competitors. It is better to identify them, research how they create content, and make something new.
- Research and make a plan of the future article, find out more about new trends and statistics before writing the article. It will help you become a trustworthy expert in your space. Only valuable information makes your users and competitors return to your site.
- Share the texts with your customers before publishing and ask for feedback.
- Check for Grammar and Spelling, which are also the quality signal.
2. Update your content regularly
True, engaging and high-quality content is good. However, Google considers your blog as a good resource for searchers only if you publish regularly. On average, you should add a new blog post once or twice per week. It will allow readers to scan your new content and respond to comments on your post.
3. Build backlinks
Based on the Ahrefs statistics, 91% of sites never get any organic traffic from Google. And the main reason for that is simple: they don’t have backlinks.
After studying 920 million web pages, the same statistics found that the backlinks matter more than any other factor, including keywords and the length of the texts. For search robots, your website content is noteworthy only if other sites link to you. How to gain backlinks? You can earn quality backlinks by creating an infographic, guest blogging, building internal links, etc.
4. Use headlines and sub-headers
Headlines and subheads make your writing skimmable for search engine robots. Traditionally, SEO experts add keywords in the headers and subheaders. However, don’t overuse them because robots may consider them as a form of spam. Headlines and subheads also help gain more traffic and backlinks as readers are more likely to read and share texts with them.
5. Add keywords
Generally, writers add keywords in the title, meta descriptions, body of the text, headlines, and ALT tags. However, each blog post should contain from two to five keywords. Marketers usually use the keyword search tools when identifying which keywords to add in the text. For example, the WordStream Free Keyword tool or the one from Google may help you find relevant keywords. Some companies hire an SEO agency to do that for them.
6. Keep paragraphs short
Talking about text structure, you should keep your paragraphs short. They should be logical and have their own idea. One paragraph should include about 2-3 sentences. It is also good to use various formatting options, namely bullet points, changing your font, highlighting text. That makes it responsive and easier to read and less boring for mobile users.
7. Create SEO-friendly URLs
Most studies confirm that URLs are a significant ranking factor and important SEO elements. Crafted well, they provide a better UX and help search engines better categorize and faster identify the page. Plus, they are easier to share.
SEO-friendly URLs should be simple, compelling, and short: three to five words are usually enough. Also, try to avoid using unnecessary words, stop words (a, an, but, and, or), and uppercase letters. The latter may result in 404 errors or redirects. It is good to use hyphens to separate words. Don’t forget to add a target keyword for each page.
8. Avoid large images
Images make your content attractive and shareable. For e-commerce websites, well-optimized photos are critical. The reason why is simple: people want to learn more about a product before they buy it. As a result, they choose those websites that provide good and relevant photos.
Keywords in the image files and the ALT tags help optimize pictures. Please note that large pictures affect the load time and hurt the SEO. The size of the photo you add should be small and of good quality.
That said, image editors may help resize and compress your images fast and with no effort from your side. What’s more, there are some helpful tools to help marketers and writers create SEO-friendly content.
9. Use Seo tools
SEO experts see search engines as complex machines. For a human, it is sometimes hard to predict what Google would love. That’s why marketers use special tools to help them.
As mentioned above, search engines love quality and unique content. Hemingway Editor may help to create readable texts. It analyzes your text and highlights sentences, which are hard to read, contain passive voice, or phrases, which have simpler alternatives, etc.
As for plagiarism, you may use plagiarism checkers to analyze your article. They help find and highlight examples of plagiarism. Some of them may offer variants you may choose to achieve original content.
Keyword research tools may help increase organic traffic by 34.1%. There are free and paid keyword research tools. The choice is up to you. Most SEO experts prefer to use the Google Search Console or Google Trends for keyword research.
Marketers and SEO experts are spending much time and money to get more quick SEO wins. True, there’s so much to consider when developing a working SEO-strategy. However, quality content and top-notch user experiences provide more value to your customers and remain the best approach to ranking in search engines. Follow the steps above and let your website rank higher.
Author bio: Marie Barnes is a Marketing Communication Manager at TheAdsy. She has a lot to share on the topics of Marketing, SEO, PR, and Branding.
I want to thank you for this article, with the help of this blog post I got a lot of information about SEO friendly content and give me an idea for content marketing. Keep giving us this information.