how to make your article seo friendly

SEO Writing: How To Write SEO Content (12 Easy Tips)

Learn how to create SEO-Optimized content. Follow our tips to write SEO-friendly content that users love to read.

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What Is SEO Writing?

Why is seo writing important, how to write seo content, key learnings, learn more about seo writing.

Writing for SEO is an art. The job of an SEO writer is to write content for search engines and users. To do that successfully, you must know how to apply basic SEO content principles in practice.

In this guide, you’ll learn everything you need about SEO writing. I will explain what SEO writing is and give you 12 SEO content writing tips to ensure that each content you write is search-engine friendly.

SEO writing is the process of writing content to rank high in search engines like Google, for related keywords.  This is done by doing keyword research and writing SEO-optimized and helpful content relevant to the user’s search intent.

SEO writing is also known as SEO copywriting or search engine optimization writing.

SEO writing is important because if you want your content to get traffic from search engines, it needs to appear in the top positions of the SERPs. According to studies, the majority of search engine traffic goes to the top 5 positions.

Another reason is growth. If you consistently write content that keeps users and search engines happy, it will have a positive effect on your Google trust and you’ll be able to rank for more keywords.

Over time, you’ll experience a steady growth of organic traffic with numerous other benefits for your business.

Follow these rules to start creating optimized SEO content.

• Find Your Primary And Secondary Keywords
• Craft Your Page Title And Meta Description
• Create An SEO Friendly URL
• Satisfy Search Intent
• Create Helpful, Unique Content
• Use Keywords In Your Content
• Create Meaningful Subheadings
• Add Internal Links With Relevant Anchor Text
• Optimize Content For E-E-A-T
• Optimize Content For Featured Snippets
• Add And Optimize Images
• Make Your Content Easy To Read On Mobiles

1. Find Your Primary And Secondary Keywords

The first step before writing new content is to decide which keywords to target.

This process is known as keyword research, and it’s very important for a simple reason. You need to write content around topics that people search for and keyword research will tell you that.

When you do your keyword research, the outcome will be a set of SEO keywords both head (or primary keywords) and long tail keywords that people type in search engines.

The easiest way to do this is to:

• Go to Google and search for your chosen topic (general).
• Visit the top 5 pages and analyze the type of content they provide.
• Take each URL and, using Semrush or other tools (Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, etc), find out for which keywords those pages are ranking and the traffic they get.
• Then, depending on the results, decide which main keywords you will target in your content.
• Take those keywords again and, using a tool, find out the associated long-tail keywords and related keywords.

Here is an example of how I followed the above steps when writing this post:

I did a general search on Google using “write for SEO”.

I analyzed the first results using Semrush and found out that the keyword that has a high volume for my chosen topic is “SEO writing.”

I then used the Keyword Magic tool (utilizing the advanced filters feature) of SEMRUSH to find other related long-tail keywords.

If you take a closer look at the content, you’ll see that these keywords are used in different places throughout the article.

By following this process every time you write new content, you help search engines understand your content better, and if your content satisfies what users want, this will eventually translate to higher rankings, social media shares, and more incoming links.

2. Craft Your Page Title And Meta Description

The next step is to start thinking about your page title. Choosing a good page title is critical for the success of your content, so allocate the necessary time to come up with a title that:

• Includes your target keyword
• It’s unique for your website
• It’s interesting for users to click
• It’s around 60 characters
• It’s not the same as the existing titles on the first page of Google.

Don’t omit any of the steps, especially the last one. Before deciding on your title, go to Google, type your target keyword, and analyze the first 10 titles.

Your goal is to create a title that is unique. Otherwise, you limit your chances of getting a top-10 position. Google rarely shows pages with the same title in the first 10 results.

Do the same when crafting your meta description . Make it unique, and try to describe your content in 160 characters or less. Include keywords so that users can know if the content matches their intent.

For example, look at the title and meta description below and notice how the keyword ‘learn digital marketing’ is used naturally in both.

3. Create An SEO Friendly URL

The next step is very easy to implement. When creating the permalink of your post, ensure it includes your target keywords and eliminates any unnecessary words.

Look, for example, at the URL of this post. By default, it was the same as the page title, i.e.

https://www.reliablesoft.net/seo-writing-how-to-write-for-seo-12-easy-tips/

But I have shortened it down to:

https://www.reliablesoft.net/seo-writing

Aim for having exact match URLs where possible. Read our guide on SEO-Friendly URLs for more details.

4. Satify Search Intent

After finding your target keywords, the next step before writing the content is to examine what kind of content users like to consume for the particular keywords. In other words, you need to find the search intent behind each keyword.

To do this successfully, search for your target keywords on Google and examine the top-ranking pages. What kind of content is ranking in the top positions? Are they short-form articles, long-form articles, or listicles? What is the average content length? How are the pages structured?

Also, look at the ‘People Also Ask’ section, which shows users’ common questions about a particular topic.

For example, let’s say you’re writing a post on “blogging tips”.

If you perform a search on Google, you can easily make these assumptions:

• Most articles have a list of tips, so the appropriate format for this keyword is listicles .
• For each tip, they give a summary and links to learn more.
• The average article length is 3000 words.
• Top-ranking articles have many custom-made visuals.

If you follow the above guidelines and provide content that is unique and useful, you’ll have more chances of achieving a high ranking.

Another example. If you are writing an article about ‘SEO tools,’ you will notice that almost all results are about lists with ‘Free Tools.’

This means that Google has found out that when users search for tools, although they don’t include the word ‘Free’, they intend to browse lists of Free tools.

This also means that if you target this keyword, you must adjust your title and content accordingly. Otherwise, you minimize your chances of rankings for that term.

Pro Tip: Make sure you research on both desktop and mobile, as the results are presented differently.

5. Create Helpful, Unique Content

Now it’s time to get your hands dirty and get into content writing .

You already know what your competitors have published, you have your title, and you know which keywords to include in your content. What else do you need?

You need content that has the following characteristics:

• People-first – content produced to provide value to people and not search engines.
• Original – content that is not a copy of existing content.
• Unbiased – content that is not biased but presents both sides of a story.
• Complete – content that provides a comprehensive description of a topic.
• Better – content doesn’t have to be perfect, but it has to be better than what is already published.

Follow the checklist below, every time you start creating content.

What is the ideal length of content?

I’ve mentioned above that you must make your content comprehensive enough so that users can get accurate and in-depth information about the topic.

Despite what you might have read, there is no magic number when it comes to word length.

It all depends on the topic and keywords. For some topics, you might need to write articles that are over 2000 words. For other topics, you can provide a comprehensive answer in 800 words.

Content length alone is NOT a ranking factor. What matters is the quality of the content and how well it can satisfy the user’s real intent.

To avoid any confusion, several studies have shown that the ideal article length for SEO is around 1800 words, and this is true for many cases.

Longer articles allow you to use more keywords (without keyword stuffing), and they tend to do better in social media.

But, this is a general guideline and not applicable to all cases. My recommendation is to find the average length of the first 10 results and try to provide a bit more content but better than what has already been published.

There is no reason to write a 3000-word article if you can have the same result as a 1500-word article.

6. Use Keywords In Your Content

Here is a nice tip that most SEO writers fail to follow. Once you are done with the first draft, you need to go back and revisit your post introduction.

Your goal is to make sure that your target keyword is included in your opening paragraph .

The reason is that Google always considers that content that is above the fold and high on a page is more important than content found down the page.

Adding your keywords in the first paragraph gives Google a big clue as to which keywords to associate this page with. It’s also good for the users since you can help them understand that they are on the right page.

With the introduction of machine learning to Google search algorithms (known as RankBrain), Google is trying to truly understand what the searcher wants by using natural language processing.

This means that for a given keyword, Google will look for the deeper meaning of the query and not just for exact match keywords.

For you as an SEO copywriter, it means that you need to add related keywords in your content to help them during this process.

Related keywords are keywords that have the same or similar meaning. You can find these keywords using tools like Semrush. Here is a screenshot of the related keywords for “SEO writing”.

So, you need to return to your copy and enrich it with these keywords naturally. You may have to rephrase some of your sentences, but it’s a step that can improve the relevance of your content.

7. Create Meaningful Subheadings

One of the characteristics of SEO-friendly content is that it’s easy to read by both search engines and users, and headings help in that direction.

Don’t be surprised but the majority of users won’t read your content, they will scan through it. Having meaningful headings helps them find the part they want faster.

Search engines follow the same pattern, especially for long-form content. They scan the page and look for certain elements to understand how it is structured and what topics or keywords the content covers.

To make their job easier, you can use predefined heading tags in your HTML, like the H1 tag , h2 tag, and h3.

Usually, a page has only one H1 tag, which is used for the title, and then the rest of the content has H2 for the main headings and H3 for the sub-headings.

To further improve the SEO friendliness of your copy, try to use some of your long-tail keywords in the headings. Take a closer look at the headings of this article and notice how I have added long-tail keywords in my headings.

8. Add Internal Links With Relevant Anchor Text

One of the SEO principles most SEO content writers tend to forget is internal linking . An internal link is a link that points to a page on the same website.

Why is it important?

When you publish a new page, it has to match your site’s topics. This improves relevancy and rankings. One of the ways to ‘tell’ Google that your content is relevant to the rest of the site, is to use internal links.

Although internal links are not as powerful as SEO backlinks, they are still used by Google to understand what the linked page is about, especially if the right anchor text is used in the link.

They also help users learn more about a topic (look at this article again and notice how I have used internal links to give users a way to find out more information about a topic).

Last but not least, internal links are followed by search engine crawlers, and this leads to better crawling and indexing of more site pages.

9. Optimize Content For E-E-A-T

A lot of content is published on the Internet, and to protect the quality of their search results, Google algorithms can detect which pages demonstrate Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness on a given topic.

In the SEO world, this is known as E-E-A-T and is a critical factor of SEO content and an indicator of content Quality.

Here is the relevant quote from Google’s guidelines on content quality.

How can you improve your SEO copy for E-E-A-T?

Follow these simple guidelines:

• Every page should have the author’s name and bio published (see how I use this on all my posts).
• A page should have outgoing links to trusted sources.
• A page and website, in general, should have incoming links from other trusted and related websites.

As an SEO copywriter, you cannot control the last guideline (incoming links) since this has to do more with the content promotion part, but you can control the first two.

So, revisit your content again and ensure that it links to other trusted websites and that the author bio is clearly shown on all pages.

10. Optimize Content For Featured Snippets

Another important tip for making your content more visible to search engines is optimizing for featured snippets .

A featured snippet appears on position ‘zero’ of the organic results and has a higher CTR compared to normal listings. Here is an example:

For every piece of content you publish, you should analyze the SERPs to find what kind of featured snippets Google shows for your target keywords and optimize your content accordingly. The most common types are paragraphs, lists, tables, and videos.

11. Add And Optimize Images

Before you hit the publish button, ensure your content includes optimized images.

Adding images to your content makes it more interesting and easier to read. While this is not directly related to SEO writing, it can help in many ways:

• Users are more likely to share content with high-quality images in their social media networks than content with no images.
• You can use the image alt text to give search engines more clues about your content.
• When you properly optimize your images , you have more chances of appearing in Google image search for your target (or related) keywords.

12. Make Your Content Easy To Read On Mobiles

When writing content, ensure it is optimized for reading on mobile devices. This means:

• Use a font that is big enough.
• Breaking the text into short paragraphs.
• Use lists where appropriate to make the information more digestible.
• Use responsive images that adapt to different screen sizes.
• Ensure that the main content is not confused with ads.
• The page loads fast and has no annoying popups.

Anyone can learn to write for SEO. It’s a skill that can be easily mastered through practice and by following some basic SEO principles.

If you work as a freelancer , you can apply for many SEO writing jobs. If you’re doing SEO for your website, learning how to write content for SEO will make your content get found on Google .

What you should not forget is always to put the user first. Your primary concern is providing content users want to read and then optimizing it for SEO.

This is why I have separated the process into several steps that involve writing the content naturally and then revising it for SEO.

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Alex Chris is a digital marketing consultant, author, and instructor. He has more than 18 years of practical experience with SEO and digital marketing. Alex holds an MSc Degree in eCommerce and has consulted with Fortune 500 companies in different industries. He blogs regularly about SEO and Digital marketing, and his work has been referenced by leading marketing websites. Connect with Alex on Twitter and LinkedIn .

Keep Learning

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Replicate my steps and learn how to write SEO-friendly blog posts optimized for both search engines and users.

A complete step-by-step guide on SEO content. Learn how to fully optimize your content for search engines.

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32 Comments

July 8, 2014 at 7:52 pm

this article is very useful. As iam a new learner so it helps me a lot. Thanks for all this information 🙂

November 6, 2014 at 7:19 am

Thanks for explaining in detail about SEO Friendly Content, this will be helpful.

January 10, 2015 at 2:37 pm

Great article for content writing and seo optimization..

May 25, 2016 at 8:30 am

Thanks for this wonderful post. SEO is an great part of blogging, and helps to get constant flow of traffic over long periods of time. Both on page and off page optimization are equally important, but I have been trying to learn more and more about on page optimization. Learned quite a few rocking tips on how to write SEO optimized posts.

Thanks bro.

May 25, 2016 at 10:47 am

Thanks for commenting. Glad you find my post useful. You can also check https://www.reliablesoft.net/ebook/wordpress-seo-guide/ for more actionable tips and advice about on-page and off-page SEO.

All the best Alex

January 29, 2017 at 7:19 am

Thanks i read it alreally. Really usefull for my site. Thank you so much bro.

July 15, 2016 at 8:46 am

Great little article! Giving the basics of SEO in an incredibly light and informative way. Very easy to read and understand thank you for your help!

July 16, 2016 at 10:49 am

well..informative blog..I am planning to rewrite content for one of my websites.I would like to ask about keyword density. please guide for the same..thanks in advance ..

July 21, 2016 at 8:01 am

Great article, many thanks.

July 22, 2016 at 6:23 pm

Great tips Alex! Writing for SEO without sounding like an SEO is easier these days. Ridiculous keyword stuffing is redundant and luckily Google is better penalizing for it. I’m generating ideas on my next piece of content with keyword tools. I like search suggestion tools like Answerthepublic.com or sg.serpstat.com but being organic in your writing isn’t something you can acquire with a tool)

January 19, 2017 at 4:31 pm

You are write Alex. If you wanna have frequently visited web/blog, you must have a well prepared showcase.

January 20, 2017 at 1:43 pm

Very well said! Prepare your content from the beginning so that it’s ready and in good shape once the traffic starts to flow in.

Thanks Alex

January 23, 2017 at 9:37 pm

Really amazing information with full detail but in point 5 you have a spelling mistake “big fun” instead of” big fan”. Thanks Alex

January 23, 2017 at 10:33 pm

Thanks for your comment. Spelling mistake corrected.

April 6, 2017 at 1:23 pm

This is my first comment here so I just wanted to give a quick shout out and tell you I genuinely enjoy reading through your posts. Can you recommend any other blogs/websites/forums that deal with the same subjects? Thanks a lot!

April 19, 2017 at 8:54 am

Thank you for your advice. I have a question for you: my blog is new, how to develop content the most effectively and get more traffic with content marketing.

April 20, 2017 at 1:40 pm

Take a look at these two posts: https://www.reliablesoft.net/how-to-write-content-that-actually-deserves-to-get-links/ and https://www.reliablesoft.net/seo-friendly-blog-posts/ . They describe the process I use to create new content and increase my traffic.

October 27, 2017 at 4:15 am

Hey Alex, your article is awesome. You start easy and basic and I think everyone can follow your step by step description. What do you think is the worst mistake one can make while writing friendly SEO content?

October 27, 2017 at 8:40 am

Keyword stuffing. SEO Friendly content has to be written naturally without exaggerating with the use of keywords.

December 20, 2017 at 9:24 am

Impressive article on SEO. Very easy to read and understand thank you for your help!

January 11, 2018 at 10:58 am

hey Alex, your post is excellent and so informative. it is really helpful for a beginner blogger like me. keep up the good work. i have a question, what would be the minimum word limit of the article??

June 7, 2018 at 7:05 pm

I am a beginner in the blogging industry. I really benefited by your super reach article. That helps me to write an SEO optimized post. Do I have some question, How to write a perfect SEO title and meta title? and how to find the best keyword? please help me, sir…..

November 6, 2018 at 2:04 pm

Can you please let me know that if I use an image for which I don’t have copyright like images from direct Google search.Then what will be the effect to my website?Are there any risk of penalized my website by Google.

March 26, 2019 at 10:55 am

You should always reference the source of the image by adding a link to your content. There is no Google penalty from using images from Google search.

Hope this helps Alex

October 10, 2019 at 4:18 pm

hi there, informative clear updated thanks for the detailed explanation with a presentation, it will be really helpful to enhance in-depth knowledge about Content Writing Skills.

November 23, 2022 at 3:28 pm

Thanks! Glad I could help.

November 1, 2019 at 3:29 pm

Best article for a beginner to kick start with basic SEO for a blog 2019. I am a beginner and it’s very helpful to me.

January 3, 2021 at 9:27 pm

Hey Alex, thanks a lot. This is a very informative post and you have written all the things about SEO in a very easy way. Thanks for sharing this kind of nice content.

Regards Mohit

May 25, 2021 at 2:23 pm

Writing a content with SEO tactics is not an easy task, but here you wrote a wonderful post which make easy to write SEO friendly content.

September 2, 2021 at 5:54 pm

Wow Very informative article Alex as usual. Thanks for sharing.

November 23, 2022 at 3:29 pm

Thanks a lot for commenting.

January 2, 2024 at 8:58 am

Thank you for this incredibly helpful guide on SEO writing! Your 12 easy tips provide a clear roadmap for creating SEO-friendly content. The breakdown makes it so much simpler to understand and implement these strategies. Grateful for the valuable insights that will surely improve content creation. Much appreciated!

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How to Write SEO Friendly Content: 15 Blog Posts & Article Tips

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In this guide, you’ll learn how to write SEO friendly content.

As you’ll discover below, the basic process for how to write SEO friendly blog posts and articles starts with keyword research and understanding user search intent, then uses a variety of methods to optimize the content for search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

By the end of this step-by-step guide, you’ll know how to write an SEO friendly article that can rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for your target keywords. Consider this your ultimate list of tips and advice for writing better SEO writing.

Table of Contents

How to Write SEO Friendly Content

1. choose the right seo keywords.

Picking target keywords to focus on is important because this guides the entire writing process and ensures you’re writing content that users are actually searching for on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

The best place to start is with a keyword research tool like KWFinder, Ubersuggest, or Google Keyword Planner. These tools can help you uncover good search terms to target for your content by using a “seed keyword” to generate relevant ideas. Then, based on SEO metrics like keyword competition and monthly search volume, you can choose the optimal search terms to target based on your website’s Domain Authority and long-term content goals.

If you need help with this step, then you can check out my Keyword Accelerator Playbook to learn a proven process for finding the best— and easiest to rank —keywords that are perfect for your individual blog or website.

2. Identify User Search Intent

The next step in the writing process is to identify the user search intent for your target keywords.

A common mistake beginners make is not formatting their content in a way that matches user search intent. And when this happens, the article or blog is not SEO friendly enough for the search engine algorithms to rank it high in the search engines for the target keywords.

Now, compare that to a transactional keyword phrase such as “ best SEO books to buy ”. The SERP results look much different and the ranking blog posts and articles are formatted as list-style content with multiple book recommendations, individual book reviews, book cover images, and links to purchase the SEO books.

As you can see, each keyword Google ranks content that is SEO friendly which also matches the format and structure its algorithm has determined is the best match for the user search intent. Therefore, you need to make sure your articles and blog posts do the same.

To do that, just do a quick search on Google to find out what type of content it’s favoring for your target keyword. Then make something similar.

3. Create An SEO Friendly Content Structure

The next step for how to write SEO friendly blog posts is to create a good content structure for your articles.

After going through step 2 above, you’ll already know the basic format for how your content should be structured based on the user search intent. However, there are a few key elements you need to pay attention to in order to make your content the friendliest it can be for the search engine crawlers.

Essentially, you want your SEO content to have three sections:

If you look at the outline of this blog post, you’ll see that it follows this SEO friendly structure. After the introduction, there’s a main H2 subheading that’s followed by 15 H3 subheadings that explain the sub-points of the main topic. Next, there are additional H2 subheadings that answer related questions to the main topic of writing SEO friendly blog posts and articles. Finally, there’s a summary paragraph.

4. Pick the Best Article Length

Once your article has the basic structure in place, the next step you should follow before actually writing the SEO content is to pick the best length for it.

Another article explains the ideal blog post length for SEO which is between 2,100 to 2,400 words.

You can check out those other blog posts for more details on this topic or just get a feel for how long your SEO content should be by analyzing the competitors in SERPs. It may be a 1,500-word article, 3,000-word blog post, or 5,000-word piece of content based on what Google’s algorithm is preferring to show users in the SERPs for specific search queries.

5. Write the SEO Friendly Blog Post or Article

Now, you just need to write the blog post or article.

6. Add SEO Keywords to the Content

With your first draft complete, the next step is to add your SEO keywords to the content.

Go back through your article or blog post and look for areas where you can add your target keywords in a natural way. Don’t just force them into random sentences.

However, you don’t want to overoptimize your on-page SEO , otherwise, Google, Yahoo, or Bing may devalue your rankings. So make sure to follow the guidelines in that linked post for the best practices for on-page SEO.

7. Optimize for Featured Snippets

Featured Snippets are highlighted excerpts from indexed content that appears at the top of Google’s search results pages and is known as “Position 0”. These Featured Snippets provide users with a quick answer to their search query and can drive a lot of quality traffic to your website.

If you see a table, for example, include a table with similar data in your article with a relevant H2 tag above it. If you see a paragraph snippet, analyze the bolded words being used and try to write a better (and more SEO friendly) paragraph with a keyword-optimized H2 tag above it to hopefully grab that Featured Snippet spot.

8. Add SEO Friendly Images

At this point, you’ve completed the bulk of the writing process. Now, you need to go back through your article and add SEO friendly images to further improve the relevancy of the content for your target keywords.

Image optimization is not only great for on-page search engine optimization but it also helps your blog posts and articles get additional traffic from Google Image Search. The images you optimize for SEO can rank in the Image search engine to drive more qualified traffic to your website.

A good rule of thumb is to add one image for each keyword you’re targeting in the content to make it the most friendly for SEO. For example, if you’re targeting 3 keywords in a blog post, then make sure to have 3 images uploaded to the page.

9. Add Relevant Internal Links

Another important step for writing SEO friendly blog posts and articles is to add internal links to other relevant articles.

By adding internal links like this, you’re adding to the expertise, trust, and authority (E-A-T) factors that Google’s algorithm takes into consideration when indexing and ranking content in the SERPs.

High-quality and trustworthy articles often have internal links that improve the user experience, which is a signal that Google can measure. These links also help improve the topical relevance of the page by connecting it to other related content. You can read more about this idea of creating a topic cluster content strategy here .

You can see that I’ve followed this same advice throughout this entire article by linking other relevant pages on the SEO Chatter website.

10. Add Authority Outbound Links

Reboot Online Marketing Ltd conducted an outbound linking experiment (twice) that revealed external links can help improve a web page’s rankings. However, this 2016 article on Search Engine Roundtable indicates otherwise (i.e., John Mueller said links to specific websites are not a ranking factor).

But in this July 2019 Google Webmasters video , John Mueller said: “Linking to other websites is a great way to provide value to your users. Oftentimes, links help users to find out more, to check out your sources, and to better understand how your content is relevant to the questions that they have.”

Now, regardless if linking out to other websites is a direct ranking factor or not, the fact is that user experience and the value provided to users is Google’s top priority. Therefore, adding outbound links to highly relevant, and high-authority, websites is a great way to provide extra value to your visitors that can be rewarded with higher rankings for your blog posts and articles in the SERPs.

11. Make the Meta Tags SEO Friendly

Once you’ve followed all of the previous steps of this guide, and have your content written as SEO friendly as possible, the next thing you should do is optimize the meta tags. This includes the meta title tag and meta description for the article.

The meta title tag appears in Google’s search engine results pages as the title for your indexed web page. The meta description shows up as the short summary of the content.

The basic strategy here is to include your main SEO keyword as close as possible to the start of your meta title tag and keep the total length of this text less than 60 characters. You also want to put your keyword in the meta description field and limit its length to 160 characters.

Now, Google may or may show your optimized meta description based on the search query the content is ranking for, but you don’t need to worry about that. The SEO relevancy has already been established by inserting your keyword into that field.

12. Optimize the H1 Page Title

If you’re serious about writing SEO friendly articles, then you need to know how to optimize the H1 tag properly. You can read my complete guide on SEO H1 tag best practices or just follow this simple tip for your blog posts:

Copy your SEO friendly meta title tag into the H1 tag, which is typically your blog post or article title. That’s it.

13. Create An SEO Optimized URL

The URL structure of your blog posts and articles is also important for SEO. To optimize this HTML attribute to make it as friendly as possible for the search engines, all you need to do is put your main target keyword in the URL.

For example, the URL for the article “ What Is SEO Content? ” is simply /what-is-seo-content/ . You can clearly see what the target keyword phrase is just by looking at the SEO optimized URL.

14. Review the Content

It’s easy to miss things when you’re writing a long article, but having every important component of a properly optimized piece of content can ensure your blog post has the best chance of ranking higher in the SERPs from start.

15. Publish the Blog Post or Article

The final step is to publish your content on the website. And once it’s live, you can open up other relevant articles to add keyword-optimized internal links (mentioned in step 9) to help add topical relevance to your newly published blog post.

What Is An SEO Friendly Blog?

What is an seo friendly article.

An SEO friendly article is a type of content that’s written in a way that helps the search engines rank it high in the SERPs. Articles that are SEO friendly include target keywords on the page, match the search intent of the user, and contain high-quality content.

How Do I Know If My Article Is SEO Friendly?

Seo friendly blog posts & article writing tools.

Below is a list of tools you can use to check, verify, and write SEO friendly blog posts, articles, and other types of content for your website.

Learn More About SEO Friendly Writing

The links below explain more about SEO friendly content to help you better optimize your articles and blog posts. Use these resources to expand your knowledge on the subject.

Writing SEO Friendly Content Summary

As you discovered, the basic process for how to write SEO friendly blog posts and articles includes proper keyword research, followed by user intent analysis, then adding SEO keywords in the right locations throughout the content. The tips on this page explained how to write an SEO friendly article; however, there are also effective writing assistant tools you can use to check and verify your content is well-optimized for search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

SEO Chatter is dedicated to teaching the fundamentals of search engine marketing to help marketers understand how to increase organic website traffic and improve search engine rankings.

13 Tips to Help You Create SEO Friendly Content

Home Blog Digital Marketing 13 Tips to Help You Create SEO Friendly Content

Updated on May 24th 2023

Irina Weber | 18 min read

Optimizing for both search engines and users is one of the most important things you can do for your content.

However, creating SEO friendly content often requires time and efforts. But in the end, you can expect them to pay off – if you do it right.

Many people think that SEO-optimized content can’t be user-friendly. This actually happens to be a total misconception because well-optimized, high-quality content essentially improves your chances of ranking higher in search results .

In order to help you get your content ranking better in search engines, check out this set of SEO rules and tips that I’ve collected in this article.

1. Carry out a keyword research

Although SEO is leaning towards encouraging users to create thought-leadership types of content, keywords still play an important role. Finding the right keywords will help you dominate the search results and satisfy your target audience. While choosing your target keywords, define the following:

• The volume of searches for a particular keyword in a given timeframe. Using the wrong keywords will lead to a waste of your time and budget.
• Understand the searcher intent  behind the keywords you want to use.
• Research resources to create competitive content have already shown up in the search results.
• Focus on long-tail keywords. They might have a low search volume, but they still give a high possibility to rank on the SERPs. People usually use longer keyword phrases when they want to find out more specific information about a particular topic.

Here are some great sources to let you perform excellent  keyword research for your SEO friendly content:

1. Use the tools like SE Ranking Keyword Suggestion tool , AnswerThePublic , or Google Keyword Planner  to find the best keywords.

2. Generate new variations of your target keywords using Quora . People use this tool to discuss industry-related topics that aren’t filtered by search.

3. Use Related Searches on Google to learn more about your customers and what their intent is.

4. Google Autocomplete will provide keyword suggestions based on real user queries. By the way, SE Ranking also have a tool – Keyword suggestions – that helps to pick the keywords just the way people do the search.

5. Search for topic-specific pages on Wikipedia. It’s the online resource made by humans that people trust, use, and reference. It also ranks very high in SERP.

6. Reach different industry forums to see what questions and topics your customers are interested in.

7. Spy on your main competitors and figure out which keywords are driving tons of quality traffic.

8. Find keyword ideas on Amazon. It has total domination of the organic search results for any transactional keywords.

Once you find the target keywords, make sure to include them in the right places:

• Meta description: keep it between 150-160 characters
• Within your content: use keywords in H1-H6 tags
• Image names and alt image tags

Notice that over-using keywords will hamper your content readability. So avoid doing this and don’t confuse your readers. In addition to this – avoid keyword stuffing.

Create blog posts and other types of content that solve problems or answer questions of your audience. Include your keywords throughout the content in a natural way.

2. Structure your content

If you want to create great content, follow a solid structure.

First, identify the main part of your post. Dividing it into different parts can make your writing easier and faster. Once you structure your content, you can work on each part separately without any time to organize your thoughts.

Each piece of content should include an introduction, main body and conclusion. You can divide the body into different parts and write content that showcases your personality and resonates with your audience.

Something people may miss is to make the most of their conclusion. End your content with a strong call to action for people to take the desired action.

For example, I liked the guide from West Coast Shipping . They outlined 6 main steps to ship a car and explore each step by adding compelling calls to action to each part.

3. Write catchy titles

Titles have a huge impact on your SEO purposes and user-friendliness.

Descriptive and catchy titles can help readers tell what your blog post is about, and what they will get from reading it.

To increase your chances of ranking higher, optimize your titles for SEO by following these simple tips:

• Use your target keyword at the beginning of your title.
• Keep your title under 60 characters . Google displays the first 60 characters in the search results.
• Make sure to describe the post’s content accurately.

Once you craft your title, check out its overall score with  CoSchedule . The tool shows an analysis of grammar, readability, and the length of your title. You will also get Google Search Preview and Email Subject Line Preview.

To hook your audience and increase your CTR, you can use emotional modifiers in your titles, such as “best,” “amazing,” “funny,” “free,” “how to,” “surprising” and so on.

Heading tags

Creating compelling subtitles will improve your content readability. Using subtitles in a hierarchical mode is essential. The title of a blog post should contain only one H1 tag on the page and include a target keyword. The main sections should contain an H2 tag, and the subsections should be H3.

It makes sense to create different heading tags. Using similar tags can mislead users and search engines that you’re presenting the same information twice.

4. Write SEO friendly URLs

Well-crafted URLs are one of the most important SEO elements.

According to  Backlinko , URLs are a significant ranking factor. They provide a better user experience and are easier to share.

When it comes to creating SEO friendly URLs, use the following rules:

• Include the target keyword for each page. That will improve the search visibility of your website and help search engines better categorize and identify the page.
• Shorten your URLs by removing unnecessary words. The average URL should be around 60 characters  or three to five words.
• Use hyphens to separate words. For example, http://website.com/how-to-write -seo-friendly-posts/
• Use lowercase letters. Uppercase letters can result in redirects or 404 errors on some servers.
• Avoid stop words, such as a, an, but, and or.
• Keep your URLs simple, compelling and relevant.

Here is a good example from Rosen Injury Lawyers  that create well-structured SEO friendly URLs. They look concise and clean and identify the core keyword.

5. Use small paragraphs

One thing to keep in mind is to keep your paragraphs short.

It doesn’t mean that each sentence needs to start on a new line, but the paragraphs should be arranged logically and have their own idea. Stick to small paragraphs (about 2-3 sentences).

Use different formatting options, such as bullet points, highlight text, and change your font. That makes it easier for mobile users to read the content and make your content less boring.

6. Optimize meta description

The meta description is a summary of your content that Google uses to show beneath your title in the search results. It is important to make it appealing and informative to encourage readers to click your blog post.

The meta description should explain what your article is about and include your target keywords. The meta description length is between 155-160 characters .

There’s no guarantee that the original meta description you’ve labored over will appear in the search results.

So, the best solution is to figure out your target keyword and include it naturally in your meta description. If Google finds a match in your meta description, they will probably use your tag.

7. Optimize images

Including and optimizing images  in your content is a great way to effectively get your points across and improve the reader’s experience. Image optimization is similar to traditional SEO.

Google Images can’t read a text in images , but they can interpret the content of images to define images’ relevance in the search results. You need to give proper Alt text and descriptive titles, captions, and filenames.

The ALT text is not visible to website visitors, but search engines use this information to understand the subject matter of an image better. In case images don’t load on a given device, people will see ALT texts instead. Try to create useful and informative content that contains your core keywords appropriately and naturally in your ALT text.

Here is the example of an ALT text for an image: <img src=”puppy.jpg” alt=”Dalmatian puppy playing fetch”/>

8. Add links that make sense

Whenever you write a new blog post, include some words, statistics or points that could benefit from further clarification.

What this means is don’t refrain from adding internal and external links to your article. They help your readers explore a topic in more depth while staying focused on the main point.

Internal linking is an effective way to: help search engines understand the relevance of your content, make your readers spend more time on your site, and reduce the bounce rate. Linking out to useful external resources like Wikipedia will build trust and improve user experience.

Also, you’ll want to add descriptive anchor text to the links as people can better understand what the link is about. Try to use a reasonable number of links. No one knows what number of links  you should include. Just make sure that your links are relevant, natural, and useful for readers.

9. Use the optimal content length

For a typical blog post, 1300 to 1500 words should be the minimum word count.

This is because Google likes longer content, as it tends to get more likes and mentions on social media. Therefore, longer posts have good chances of ranking better in the search.

The optimal content length is around 2000 words . But it shouldn’t be your number one goal to write 2000 words every time.

First and foremost, you need to provide the most useful and informative content for your readers that determine their search intent.

Quality is more important than quantity. So, check out your top ranking content to see what articles get the most views and analyze the impact of content length.

10. Optimize your content for mobile

Now mobile/tablet internet usage sits at 56%  globally.

Optimizing your blog for mobile device s is a must for search engines, as Google is now ranking mobile-friendly websites higher.

It is therefore essential to have a responsive website design as Google penalizes non-mobile-friendly sites.

You’ll also want to adapt your web design for mobile, tablet and desktop devices. Simple navigation and layout make it easier for users to find all necessary information quickly. This means you’ll want to analyze the load speed of your site.

Use Accelerated Mobile Pages  to build content that loads instantly and improve the overall user experience.

To check out whether your site has any issues, such as site speed, mobile optimization, HTML validation, etc., I recommend SE Ranking Website Audit . The tool evaluates all key parameters and provides actionable tips on how to fix issues if necessary.

11. Update your content regularly

Even if you create engaging and high-converting content, you need to write blog posts and update your site content on a regular basis.

This is because Google wants to provide searchers the best results for their search queries. As a result – if you don’t publish regularly, Google won’t consider your blog as a good resource for searchers.

Once or twice per week is a great starting point. Give your readers some time to digest your fresh content, and respond to comments on your post. Use copywriting tips  to improve your writing skills.

12. Use social media share buttons

Want to get free links? Make it easier for users to find your social share buttons and spread your content around the web.

Beautifully designed buttons will encourage people to click and share your publications.

13. Include schema markup

Implementing schema markup will help search engines better analyze your content. It divides each part of your publications and explains search engines what these parts mean.

Use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper  to add markup to your blog posts easily. For example, if you want to add schema markup to your title, choose the right section “Articles,” enter the URL and start tagging.

In the left panel, highlight your title, choose the type of schema markup and create HTML. Copy this code and replace your source code for this post with this HTML.

Bonus tip: use SEO analysis Tools

If you want to write readable and SEO-friendly blog posts, you can’t do without SEO analysis tools.

Powerful SEO tools  can help you find the best performing keywords for your content, create and submit a sitemap, check your mobile optimization, analyze your link profile, detect and disavow bad links, etc.

Examine your writing before pushing it to the web. Make sure that it is free of grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors. Check the readability of your text with  Grammarly .

To figure out the most popular content on your site, you can use a tool like  Finteza . It offers detailed estimations, such as bounce rates, page depth, visits, conversions, and the actions of leads. Using this data you can optimize your links and content accordingly.

The bottom line

It will take some time to find out how to create an SEO friendly content for your site but in the long run, it will be extremely worthwhile.

Follow these practical tips to write SEO friendly content and drive value from your copywriting efforts. They will help you ensure that good content leads to more shares, leads, links and repeat visitors.

My name is Irina Weber, a freelance writer, and content strategist. I love helping brands to create, publish, repurpose, and distribute content through different marketing channels. I am a regular contributor to a lot of media outlets like SEW, SME, SMT, CMI, etc.

Freelance Writer @Mention

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10 tips for an awesome and SEO-friendly blog post

Writing blog posts requires skill. To keep readers interested, you should think about the structure of your content and keep it enjoyable. Because if people like and understand your post, they’re much more likely going to share it with others – and that will increase your rankings. So, if you want to improve your writing skills and your rankings, start with these tips on how to write an SEO-friendly blog post!

It might sound like writing for SEO and writing to attract and engage your audience are two conflicting goals. But that’s actually not true. Sure, if you want to write an SEO-friendly post, you should feature the words you want to be found in a prominent place. But  over -using keywords severely damages the readability of your text. In fact, a high keyphrase density can even be a signal to Google that you might be stuffing keywords in your text, which can negatively affect your rankings.

This post provides tips on writing blog posts that are SEO-friendly and readable. These two goals should always go hand in hand. Because we believe that writing in understandable language gets you more visitors and keeps them on your site!

Master SEO copywriting and other vital SEO skills by getting Yoast SEO academy Premium . This gives you access to all our courses and the Yoast SEO Premium plugin!

Before you start: do keyword research

Before you start writing , you have to do  keyword research . If you want to dominate the search results, you’ll have to figure out which words your audience actually searches for. These are the topics you should write about and the keywords you should use in your text.

When you’ve done your keyword research and have a list of focus keywords to write about, it’s time to get on with writing. Here are 10 tips to help you end up with an awesome blog post!

Writing tips for SEO-friendly blog posts

Above all, your blog post has to be a good piece of writing. When starting a new post, many bloggers just start writing. While this may work for some people, others need more guidance. Personally, I always follow these ‘rules’ when I write a new blog.

1. Think before you write!

Before you start, think carefully about the message of your piece. It helps to answer the following questions:

• What do you want to tell your readers, or which central question do you want to answer?
• What’s the purpose of your article?
• What do you want your readers to do at the end of the page?

It’s also good to think about the search intent someone may have. An easy way to get an insight into this is by looking at the search results for the search term you want to rank with.

2. Devise a structure for your post

To write a readable and SEO-friendly blog post, you need to create a clear structure . This means that every post should have:

• some sort of introduction (in which you introduce your topic).
• a body (in which the main message is written).
• a conclusion (in which you summarize the main ideas or draw a conclusion).

In a few sentences, write down what you want to say in all three sections. You’ve now created a summary of your post. This will help you create a structured and readable blog post. Now the real writing can begin.

3. Use paragraphs and headings

Everybody uses paragraphs, but not everybody uses them well. For example, it might be tempting to start each new sentence on a new line because it looks nice. But you shouldn’t do that! You also shouldn’t make your paragraphs too lengthy , as each paragraph should have its own idea or subject. So, ask yourself what the main idea of each paragraph is. You should be able to summarize that main idea in one sentence. If that’s not possible and you need more sentences to explain the main idea, you simply need to use more paragraphs .

Proper headings also help your readers understand what a specific part of your text is about. If you want people to find their way through your articles, use subheadings to lead them. Subheadings help readers scan your page, and clarify the structure of your articles. They’re not just important for readability, but  for SEO as well . That’s why we also advise to use your keyword in some of your subheadings . Don’t use your keyword in every heading! It will make your text read clunky and unnatural. Plus, it will put people off from reading further.

4. Use transition words

Transition words help people scan through your text and understand the relationship between sentences and paragraphs. For example, let’s say there are three reasons for people to buy your product. You should use signal words like: ‘first of all’; ‘secondly’ and ‘finally’. Also, words like ‘however’, ‘similarly’ and ‘for example’ give a clear signal to your readers. Readers will instantly get that a conclusion will follow after words like ‘to sum up’ or ‘in short’. Transition words are therefore very important to add structure to your text.

5. Use related keywords

Stuffing your article with your focus keyword makes it less attractive to read, and it can hurt your rankings. Google is getting smarter, after all. It wants you to write content that users will love. It doesn’t want you to use your focus keyword in every other sentence, because Google now has other ways to analyze what your text is about. For example, one of the ways Google understands the topic of your text is by recognizing synonyms and other keywords that are related to your focus keyphrase. That’s why you should use synonyms and related keywords throughout your copy.

Synonyms are relatively easy to think of, but finding the right related keywords is a bit more challenging. That’s why the Yoast SEO plugin comes with a feature that helps you find related keyphrases right away. Based on your focus keyword, our plugin can generate a number of related keyphrases with the click of a button! Along with how many times that keyword is searched for and what the search trend looks like. This feature is powered by SEMrush and can be used in both our free and Premium plugins. So use this related keyphrase feature !

6. Optimize the length of your article

Make sure your blog posts have a minimum of 300 words but keep the length of your article balanced. Google likes long articles. However, if your article is too long, you might scare users away. So, what should you do? Our advice is to write short to medium-length articles. When you know you’re a skilled writer, you can also try your hand at longer articles. Check out this article if you’re not quite sure how long a blog post should be .

And remember to keep using your focus keyphrase throughout your text to make sure you end up with an SEO-friendly blog post!

7. Link to existing content

If you’ve already written content on the same topic as your current post, don’t forget to link to and from these posts. We call this internal linking . Both your readers and Google will thank you for it, because it helps them manage your content and understand relationships between different content on your site. So, take some time to link to and from your previous content. Our internal linking tool can help you by suggesting relevant pages and posts on your site that you can link to.

To summarize, internal linking is useful because:

• Your link structure is also important for your rankings in Google.
• Linking to other content about a subject is great for your readers, as they may be interested in reading these related posts too. It helps them navigate your site!
• It will make your new blog post (and the existing posts) stronger, because you show your authority on the subject.

8. Let other people read your post

Before publishing your post, make sure to let someone else read it first. Ask them whether they understand the main concept of your post, and invite them to correct any typos and grammatical errors. They can help you by providing an objective view of the readability and attractiveness of your text. If you have someone in your team who happens to be an expert on the topic you’re writing about, make sure to run your post past them. That way, they can check whether you’re covering everything you need to and give suggestions to make your post even better.

9. Add content regularly

Regularly adding new blog posts to your website tells Google that your website is alive. This is important! Because if your site isn’t active, Google will crawl it less often and this might negatively affect your rankings. But don’t just post for the sake of posting. Make sure that everything you post is high-quality content : informative, well-written articles that entertain readers and fit their search intent .

If you have difficulty posting on a regular basis, it might be a great idea to create an editorial calendar for your blog. This allows you to structure the process in a way that fits you and your team. It’s also a good idea to update your old blog posts once in a while to avoid them getting stale.

10. Use our Yoast SEO plugin

The analysis tool in our Yoast SEO plugin helps you write readable and SEO-friendly blog posts. Start by choosing the most important search term you want people to find this particular page for. This will be your focus keyphrase. After you fill this in, our plugin runs all kinds of checks to see whether your post is optimized or still needs improving. Such as:

• Our plugin checks your post to see whether you’ve used the keyphrase in the right places, like your copy, SEO title, meta description, alt text and URL. Yoast SEO Premium also recognizes different word forms of your keyphrase.
• It gives you suggestions for related keyphrases that you can add to boost the quality and relevance of your content .
• It checks the readability of your text: Are your sentences or paragraphs too long? Do you use transition words?
• It checks the internal and external links in your article. Yoast SEO Premium even provides suggestions for links to related articles on your site.
• It calculates how often you use your keyphrase throughout your text: not enough or too often? When you have Premium it also checks if you’ve distributed your keyphrase evenly throughout your post.
• It checks if you’ve used potentially non-inclusive words or phrases , so you can make your content relatable for everyone.
• It also checks if other pages on your website use the same focus keyword, to prevent you from competing with yourself .

If you write a relatively SEO-friendly blog post (based on the aspects discussed above) the plugin will indicate this with a green light. Posts and pages with green lights will help you improve the ranking of the pages on your website.

It’s good to remember that not every light has to be green for your overall SEO score to be good. For example, these are the results of this blog post. As you can see, it does have an overall green light for the focus keyphrase “SEO-friendly blog post”:

Kind of a cool way to get feedback on your content, right? When you use the Yoast SEO plugin you’ll find this feedback in the Yoast SEO sidebar next to your post and in the Yoast meta box under your post (while editing). If you’re interested in learning more about all the aspects this analysis tool looks at, read our article on how to use the Yoast SEO content analysis tool .

The days when a few SEO tricks were enough to get your website to rank well in Google are long gone. Nowadays, quality content is king. And good content also leads to more links, shares, tweets and returning visitors to your website. Of course, there are always other things you can do to maximize the SEO friendliness of your post, but the most important thing is to just write very, very good posts! Still not sure if your blog post is ready to publish? Take a look at this checklist for your blog post to make sure you’re good to go!

Read more: SEO copywriting: the ultimate guide »

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Cindy is a content manager at Yoast. She writes and optimizes blog posts, and enjoys writing content that will help people create better content for their site and users.

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2 responses to 10 tips for an awesome and seo-friendly blog post.

I have the following question: if I am following the strategy of writing a friendly blog post and my concurrence is doing the same, how I can outrank their post, related to content creation? Let’s say we have the same focus keyword and we use the same friendly blog post strategy. I would appreciate commenting on this. I am just starting with blogging and the topic I like is sort of not highly competitive but averagely. So for me it is a big question, how to write the blog like this that mine gets positioned higher than the concurrence similar one by creating THE better content.

Hi there, Milena. Thank you for your question :) You can stand out by bringing your unique point of view to the content you’re writing. So follow the tips in this article, but also think to yourself: what can I say about this topic that’s relevant for readers and shows my expertise on the topic? This sets you apart from the competition and will help you create content that’s both helpful and original. Good luck!

• Latest Posts

How To Write An SEO-Friendly Blog Article (8-Step Checklist)

If you're running a blog, organic search traffic is arguably the biggest potential growth driver you have. SEO provides ongoing recurring traffic, without a direct cost associated with it.

So how do you make sure your articles are SEO-friendly? Here's 8 straightforward steps you can go through to maximize your chance of ranking high in the SERPs.

I've mentioned a few software tools to assist here, and tried to offer free alternatives where viable.

Let's begin!

8 steps to writing an SEO-friendly article

Here's our 8 steps. Keep scrolling for the details.

• Identify your target keyword(s) with keyword research
• Plan & write with a content optimization tool
• Write a great title for a high organic CTR
• Analyze how to win the featured snippet
• Optimize your internal links
• Edit for readability, correctness, and conciseness
• Optimize your images
• Update your content as often as is necessary

1. Identify your target keyword(s) with keyword research

If your goal is to get organic search traffic, I'd strongly recommend you do keyword research before you begin writing. You need to know what people are searching for in Google in order to optimize for it, right?

Here's three key things to look out for in this step, plus some comments on free & paid tools you can use.

The average number of searches per month for a keyword. This will help you determine the potential if you ranked #1. Is it worthwhile?

Is the trend increasing or decreasing? Is it seasonal? Here's an example of a seasonal keyword trend:

How hard will this keyword be to rank for? If you're on a newer site with relatively few backlinks & low authority, it may not be feasible to rank for highly competitive keywords yet.

Instead, you could try looking for easier alternatives. Taking the example above, instead of trying to rank for ‘pumpkin recipes', perhaps we try to rank for something more niche like ‘pumpkin protein balls'

This still has 1,800 searches per month and a growing trend, but we have a much better shot at ranking on the first page.

Read more here: How to use keyword difficulty software .

There's no point in trying to rank for a keyword if it has no relevance to your business. Being high volume & low difficulty isn't enough; you need to be able to sell your product or service to these readers in some capacity. You're trying to get an ROI on this content, right?

It's okay to pursue search terms which are informational, low-intent queries, but you need to have a strategy for converting those readers. Perhaps they're the right target market, but not yet looking to buy. In that case, you could try to get a ‘micro-conversion' like an email signup to nurture that reader.

Tooling for keyword research

If you have any budget at all, I'd recommend using KWFinder . This is the tool I used to show the search trends examples above. It comes as part of a toolset called Mangools, which also includes a rank tracker, reporting tool, and backlink monitor. Fees start at around $30 per month , making it a cheaper alternative to Ahrefs .

If you don't have a budget, here's some free tools you could try using to get started:

• AnswerThePublic
• Google autocomplete
• Google Search Console (if you have existing traffic)
• Google Trends

You won't get accurate keyword volumes, trends, or difficulty from those free tools — but it's a lot better than nothing if you're on a shoestring content budget.

Learn more: Best ways to find keywords for SEO .

2. Plan & write with a content optimization tool

To start with a definition:

A content optimization tool is something that analyzes the current top ranking pages, and generates data on what is currently working in the SERP.

I want to be clear that it's not essential to use one of these tools in order to rank, but it can speed things up, and make things a lot easier. Especially if you're not an SEO expert.

I'm going to demonstrate some of the steps here using Frase ; you can see some other similar tools here if you'd like.

The first thing you'll need to do with Frase is to create a new document, and enter your target keyword.

Decide the optimal length / word count

Different searches require different levels of content detail. Some, like ‘how old is the Queen?' can be answered in a snippet with one sentence. Others, like ‘how to cook pumpkin' likely require a longer post, with step-by-step instructions.

The best way to determine how long your content should be is to see what is currently ranking. You can check manually, but content optimization tools (including Frase) do this for you.

If you believe there are outliers (a particularly long or short post) that might skew the data, you can remove them from the analysis.

Plan your structure & outline

To outline our content structure, we will, once again, start by looking at the current top ranking results.

Using the SERP explorer, you can see at a glance which headings & subheadings competitors are using in their content. You can simply look for inspiration here, or you can click any of them to save it to your outline.

At this stage, If I were writing this article, I'd be looking to answer questions like:

• How many pumpkin recipes should I include? 5? 10? 25?
• How much detail is required per recipe?
• Should I categorize the recipes? E.g. healthy pumpkin recipes, quick pumpkin recipes etc.
• Is there any detail required before or after the list? (For example a H2 for ‘ingredients needed for pumpkin recipes')

Between your expert knowledge of the subject matter and the current SERPs, you should be able to bring all of those answers together to form a solid plan for your blog post.

Which keywords will you include?

All content optimization tools will generate these recommendations for you based on the current SERP. They'll show you which keywords to include, with a recommended frequency, and tick them off as you go. In Frase it looks like this, with the keywords in the right sidebar:

I'd add the caveat that you can (and should) override their recommendations with common sense where needed.

If the tool is telling you to add something which doesn't make sense, don't sacrifice quality & readability for it. This category of software is very useful, but there are still sometimes outliers.

Which questions will you answer?

Lastly, consider if there are any relevant questions which you haven't yet answered. You could include these as subheadings, or even simply add an FAQ section to the end of your article.

In Frase, there's a ‘Questions' tab in the right-vertical menu. If you're not using Frase, you can try checking the People Also Ask section in a Google search, or looking through Quora & Reddit threads for commonly asked questions.

3. Analyze how to win the featured snippet

Before you hit ‘publish', it's worth taking a minute to check SERP features. In particular, featured snippets. Is there a featured snippet, and if so, how could you win it?

Winning a featured snippet can help you leapfrog from pretty much any first-page position into #1.

Typically, these are the types of featured snippet formats you'll find:

And in my experience, paragraphs & lists are the most common by a long shot.

The best thing to do here is to reverse engineer what's currently working. Take a look at what's being displayed in the snippet currently, and work out how it's being displayed.

Here's one quick example. I currently have the snippet for ‘best keyword difficulty software'; here's how that looks in the SERP:

If you visited that page , you'd see that I have a simple numbered list underneath a keyword-rich H2. Therefore, for someone to steal this snippet from me, they should structure their content in a similar way.

4. Write a great title for a high organic CTR

Organic clickthrough-rate is an important metric for several reasons. More people clicking on your result obviously means more traffic.

In addition though, more people clicking on your result sends positive signals to the search engine. Google learns that your resource is what people are looking for. In turn, that can lead to higher rankings.

So, how do you write a great title? There's a bunch of tips that can apply to writing a title, but in the context of meta titles for SEO, I like to apply this model by Siege Media:

In summary, the model gives categories & examples of how you can modify titles to be more compelling.

Let's try to think of some examples. Say our original title was ‘Our Favorite Pumpkin Recipes Of All Time'. Here's how we could apply each of these modifiers to test a new title:

See if any of these ideas are applicable to your content, and try to increase organic CTR.

5. Add internal links

Internal links are important for delivering a great user experience, showing search engines which pages are important, and which are related to each other.

When you're publishing a new blog article, take some time to consider which internal links you'll add in this new post, plus which existing posts could link to this new one.

The method I usually use for finding internal link opportunities is to use this Google search operator:

site:marketingarsenal.io “keyword”

For example, you could search “site:mywebsite.com pumpkin” to find posts which could be relevant for linking to your new pumpkin recipes article.

I usually aim to add 2-4 internal links per post. Don't force them in, though. Only if you have relevant content. Doing so will help your new post get indexed faster & rank higher.

Here's 3 quick tips for adding internal links:

• Make them descriptive. It should be clear to the user & the search engine where they lead to. Avoid generic texts like ‘here' or ‘read more'.
• Could internal linking be used to push the user down the funnel? What is the logical next article someone might want to read?
• The placement of an internal link could impact how important it is perceived. For example, you could choose to prioritize a few pages to link in your nav & footer to highlight how important they are.

6. Edit for correctness, readability, and conciseness

To write an SEO-friendly blog post, your writing needs to be good quality. A search engine's job is to deliver content that:

• answers the searcher's query
• provides a great user experience

The better the user's experience, the more likely search engines are to continue ranking your page. A great user experience requires several things. One of those, though, is great writing. That means your writing should be:

• Easy to read and understand (even for non-natives)
• Correct in terms of spelling, punctuation, and grammar
• Thorough & useful, yet concise

For correctness, Grammarly is a great tool to use. For making sure your writing is concise & simple to understand, I love using Hemingway as an SEO content writing tool . You can use it for free, without even logging in.

7. Optimize your images

A great SEO-friendly article is unlikely to be a giant wall of text. There's a good chance you'll be including visuals within your content.

There are things that you can do with those images to make them a little more SEO-friendly.

Here's two quick image optimization tips for blog posts:

Compress image file sizes

Find the balance between quality and performance. Using lots of very high quality images will make a notable impact on your load speed & page performance.

If you're using a CMS like WordPress, you can find compression plugins like Smush & others which can help. Otherwise, you could use a free tool like Compress JPEG .

Consider using next-gen image formats

In recent years, new image formats have emerged which compress better and retain better quality at smaller file sizes. The most common is WebP. Once again if you're on WordPress, image optimization plugins like ShortPixel can do this for you. There's also convertor tools; just Google ‘jpeg to webp', or whichever format you're converting from.

Note: In 2022, there are still some Safari users (and perhaps a few others) that have browsers which don't support WebP still. That's something to take into consideration when choosing an ideal file format.

Whatever you do, just being conscious of this and avoiding enormous image files will go a long way.

8. Update your content as often as is necessary

As annoying as it is, content doesn't stay relevant forever. Things change, facts become outdated or inaccurate, trends & search intent change, and competitors post new content.

Every now and again, it's likely you could benefit from updating old content.

The frequency at which your content needs updating can vary a lot. In YMYL (your money/your life) niches like financial or medical advice, content will need updating very often. Same for news & trends like coronavirus news.

Typically though, somewhere around once every 6-12 months can be sufficient. Maybe less. As always in SEO: “it depends”.

You can keep an eye on your old content in a few ways:

• Check Google Analytics & Search Console data
• Use a SERP tracker to see when your rankings slip
• Use a free tool like Animalz Revive to check decaying traffic
• Use a paid content decay tool like ClickFlow (could be worthwhile if you need the additional ClickFlow features)

About the author

I'm Ryan, a SaaS SEO. Previously at Toggl (a B2B SaaS product) and Skale (a SaaS SEO agency), I'm now working on growth at Modash. I started this blog to share everything I'm learning in the world of SaaS SEO growth & marketing tools.

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SEO Writing: 13 Tips on Writing Blog Posts That Rank on Google

Published: November 09, 2023

If you've ever written a blog post before, you know how much time it can take.

From topic selection and gathering research to writing the post and pressing “Publish,” the process often demands hours. That‘s why, if your post doesn’t earn the traffic you expected, it can be a major letdown.

Fortunately, there's a way to combat low traffic: search engine optimization . As marketers, we‘re always aiming to write content that’ll rank highly on Google, and SEO is the bridge that'll help you get there. That begs the question: How do you incorporate that into your content?

Don‘t worry — we’ve got you covered. In this post, we're going to dive into 12 ways to master SEO writing.

What is SEO writing?

SEO writing is the process of writing content to rank on the first page of search engines like Google. This involves researching keywords, writing high-quality content that matches user intent, and optimizing your headers for easy page crawling.

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With higher rankings, your website increases its overall visibility. The ultimate goal is to drive organic traffic, increase conversions, and achieve business objectives through effective optimization.

If you don’t optimize your content for search engines, your website may suffer from low visibility and poor rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs). As a result, the potential reach and exposure of your content may be significantly reduced.

Why is SEO content writing important?

Without SEO, your content is less likely to rank highly on search engines. Ranking lower may hinder your ability to attract and engage with your target audience. It may also make your content seem less credible and authoritative.

A 2020 Search Engine Journal study found that the clickthrough rate for websites in position one on the SERP is 25%. This number drops drastically to 15% for websites in position two and then down to 2.5% for websites in position 10. When you get to page two of Google, that number gets even lower.

This means that if your website is not on the first page, there’s a small chance consumers will find your website organically. Fewer visits to your site mean fewer opportunities to generate leads, and ultimately, revenue.

Your next best option is investing in advertising to get those users to your site. But that costs money, and if you’re on a tight budget, why not invest time in SEO writing? It’s free and will likely bring you traffic for much longer than a campaign would.

The Basics of SEO Content Writing

When getting started with SEO content writing, it’s important to understand the basics. Here are some fundamental principles to follow when incorporating SEO into your writing.

Keyword Optimization

Keyword optimization is all about strategically using relevant keywords and phrases in your content to boost its visibility and ranking. This aspect of SEO is super important because it helps search engines better understand your content, thereby increasing the chances of it appearing in relevant search queries and attracting organic traffic.

To select the best keywords, you’ll need to research and identify what exactly your target audience is looking for and align it with your content’s topic. Finding the right balance between incorporating keywords in a way that makes sense to readers and satisfies search engine algorithms is key.

We’ll go more in-depth about how to find keywords and how to disperse them throughout your content in the tips section .

User Intent

User intent refers to the motivation or purpose behind a user's search query. It’s all about figuring out what they really want to discover when typing something into a search engine.

There are generally four types of user intent:

• Informational intent: When someone is seeking information or answers to their questions. They may be looking for definitions, explanations, how-to guides, or research materials.
• Navigational intent: When someone is searching for a specific website or brand. They already know what they want to find and are using a search engine to navigate to a particular webpage.
• Transactional intent: When someone is ready to take action, such as making a purchase, subscribing to a service, or booking an appointment.
• Commercial intent: When someone is researching products or services with the intention to buy later. They are comparing products, reading reviews, and looking for the best deals before making a decision.

By understanding user intent, you can create content that aligns with what people are looking for and boost your chances of showing up in search results. Each industry and niche also changes your user intent. For example, SEO for lawyers will be a lot different compared to SEO for marketers. It's all about giving people what they need and providing them with a good search experience.

Readability

Writing for SEO isn’t just about what you write, it’s also about how you write. It isn’t enough to just place keywords into your content and call it a day. You need to consider how your audience’s experience will be when they read it.

This is where readability comes in.

Readability is all about striking the right balance between optimizing for search engines and ensuring that your content is enjoyable and valuable to human readers.

In addition to optimizing your content with keywords and internal links, you’ll want to focus on user experience. Write in a reader-friendly manner by using clear and concise language and avoiding jargon. You’ll also want to utilize headings and make your content more scannable (more on that below).

When writing and editing your content ask yourself: Is this easy to understand? Does this have a logical flow? Is this engaging? If the answer to any of these questions is “no,” you may need to make some changes.

Historical Optimization

Every SEO writer knows that an evergreen blog post will never be completely finished, even after it’s been published. Thanks to algorithm updates and competitors targeting the same keywords, search results are always changing.

That’s why it’s important to have a content update strategy in place to ensure your older web content remains fresh and relevant in search engine rankings. This practice is called historical optimization .

To figure out which blog posts you need to update, assess your older content by conducting a content audit to find underperforming or outdated pieces. Then, determine how to improve the piece. This usually involves refreshing the content by adding new information, removing outdated information, optimizing keywords, and improving formatting and readability.

Tips on How To Incorporate SEO in Your Writing

• Start with keyword research.
• Use headings to your benefit.
• Optimize your content for featured snippets.
• Write for humans, not search engines.
• Optimize your title.
• Include keywords in your meta description.
• Add alt text to images.
• Resist the urge to keyword stuff.
• Link to high-authority websites.
• Aim for scannable, longer posts.
• Link to other posts on your site.
• Compress images for fast page load speed.
• Design a link-building strategy.

1. Start with keyword research.

It’s estimated that Google processes over 70,000 search queries a second. Staggering, right?

If you want to cut through SERP clutter and outrank your competitors, you need to target the specific keywords and phrases your potential customers are searching for. Otherwise, how else will they find your content and website?

Start with a keyword research tool . Sites like Ahrefs and Google Keyword Planner give you details on what users are searching for and how popular those queries are. For an inside look into how Ahrefs can aid you in your SEO keyword research and beyond, check out our case study and exclusive interview here.

Google Trends can also give you a feel for what keywords are popular at any given time. If you see searches are steadily declining over time for a specific keyword, you know that’s probably not the right keyword to target for your marketing. The opposite is true for rising trends.

If you’re ever running low on keyword ideas, get inspiration from your competition. Use competitive intelligence tools to see what keywords their domains currently rank for. If these keywords are relevant to your business, consider using them too.

However, keep in mind that the most obvious keywords don’t always align with your strategy. Additionally, your focus keywords will evolve over time as trends shift, terminology changes or your product/service line grows.

Be sure to conduct keyword research periodically to ensure you’re still focusing on the right keywords for your target audience and not missing out on vital ranking opportunities.

2. Use headings to your benefit.

Headers help Google’s web crawlers understand your blog post and the sections within it.

Think of the crawlers as readers who are skimming your blog. They want an overview of what your article will cover, that’s your H1. Then your H2s, H3s, H4s break down the subtopics within the piece.

So, your subheaders should reflect the content in the body and include high-intent keywords . When you use the right keywords, meaning the ones your target audience is using, you have a much higher chance of ranking on the SERP.

3. Optimize your content for featured snippets.

Featured snippets on Google are the most direct answers to search queries. For instance, if I were to search, “How do you write a blog post?” Google might use a featured snippet to show the best answer.

Start writing for SEO with HubSpot's Free AI Blog Writer.

You can then go through that draft and add the personal touches and optimizations that make it fun for humans to read.

5. Optimize your title.

Even with a great, SEO-friendly post body, a bad headline could hurt you in the SERP.

To title your post with SEO in mind, write something compelling that also incorporates your main keyword. Here are a few tips:

• Incorporate numbers. E.g.: “5 Ways to Rock a Matte Lipstick.”
• Include your offer in the title. E.g.: “How to Write a Cover Letter [+ Free Template]”
• Add a teaser. E.g.: “We Tried the New [Insert App Name] App: Here's What Happened”

Pro tip: You can speed up the process with tools like HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator . Aside from helping you brainstorm relevant titles, the platform can also pull and display keyword search volume data from Semrush — perfect for quick and easy title optimization. 

6. Include keywords in your meta description.

Are you adding meta descriptions to your post? If your answer is “no,” then you‘re probably not getting as much traffic as you could. Let’s get into why they're important.

By now, we‘ve talked about a couple of the ways a blog post can communicate with Google: subheaders, keywords, and snippets. However, that’s not an exhaustive list.

Meta descriptions are another area Google crawls to determine search rankings. Meta descriptions are the one- to three-sentence descriptions, you'll find underneath the title of a result.

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9 SEO-Friendly Content Writing Tips to Outrank Your Competition

February 5, 2020

By Alison Lillie

Search engine optimization has come a long way over the past 25 years . Long gone are the days of publishing high volumes of low-quality, wafer-thin content and expecting your search engine rankings to increase. Today, SEO is as much an art as it is a science. It requires content writers and digital marketers (now one and the same) to understand search engine ranking factors, prioritize searcher intent, and publish valuable, high-quality content that appeals users and Google’s algorithms. 

This blog post will cover nine SEO-friendly content writing tips to improve rankings. But before we get into it, I have a PSA for all the digital marketers and content writers out there: When devising a strategy to drive organic traffic to your website, remember that content writing and SEO go hand in hand. SEO is not some magic skill only technical people can execute properly. At its core, SEO is about writing content that’s better than the competition —and yes, utilizing on-page and technical SEO best practices along the way.  

So, without further ado, here are nine tactics you can use to outrank your competitors in search engine results.

• Understand Search Engine Ranking Factors
• Use the Right Keywords
• Identify and Capture Search Intent
• Optimize Content to Obtain Google Featured Snippets
• Update Old Content
• Apply the Skyscraper Method
• Prioritize High-Quality Inbound and Outbound Links
• Boost User Signals with On-Page Best Practices
• Be Aware of Site Structure and Technical SEO Best Practices

1. Understand Search Engine Ranking Factors

Before you can outrank your competition, you need to understand the foundational signals that search engines look at when evaluating and ranking content. The four most important ranking factors are content, links, site structure, and HTML tags.

Ever since the 2011 Panda algorithm update , Google has prioritized content as its number one ranking factor. When you publish any piece of content—whether it be a blog, webpage, or pillar page—it should clearly cover a specific topic in-depth, be well-written, and above all else, provide value to the reader. 

According to Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Factors , the seven most heavily weighted content ranking factors are:

• Quality: Well-written and valuable
• Research: Demonstrates authority 
• Keywords: Incorporates search terms appropriately
• Freshness: Is timely and relevant 
• Multimedia: Contains images, video, or audio to enhance user experience
• Answers: Directly answers the search query
• Depth: Covers a topic thoroughly

Understanding what each of these factors means and how to apply them is the first step toward writing content that’s competitive.  

Links, Site Structure, and HTML Tags

Aside from content, the second, third, and fourth most heavily weighted ranking factors are links, site architecture (how your site is built), and HTML tags. 

When a search engine crawls and indexes your site, it also looks at non-content factors like inbound and outbound links, URL structure, page load speed, time on page, and keyword usage in tags to understand what your site is about and how to rank your pages. 

Search engine algorithms are designed to deliver users the best content from the best websites . Implementing linking, site structure, and HTML best practices within your website content makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index your content. The quicker and more accurately a search engine crawls and indexes your content, the faster you can increase rankings and traffic.

2. Use the Right Keywords

Although there’s been debate in the digital marketing community as to whether or not keyword research is dead , keywords are still a crucial part of SEO. 

Keyword research helps you:

• Determine what topics people are talking about.
• Identify search volumes for topics.
• Understand how difficult it may be to rank for a topic.

Each piece of crawlable content you create should have a unique primary keyword target and also use Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords (natural variations of your primary keyword) throughout.

Before you start writing, brainstorm topics you know your buyer personas care about. Then, perform keyword research to identify the best ranking opportunity. The type of keyword you target will depend on the type of content you’re creating.

Blog posts should target mid- to low-volume, low-competition long-tail keywords, while comprehensive resources like pillar pages can go after shorter-tail seed keywords that have high volume and high competition. When creating blog posts, remember that longer-tail, lower competition keywords have higher conversion rates and are easier to rank for .

3. Identify and Capture Search Intent 

Once you’ve found a viable primary keyword target, validate and decide how you will write about it by digging into searcher intent. Identify what the searcher is looking for when they type the query into a search bar, and then cover the topic in a way that directly meets their needs.

According to Google’s search evaluation quality guidelines, there are four categories of searcher intent:

• Know: The searcher wants to find information on a topic to answer a question.
• Do: The searcher wants to learn how to take a specific action.
• Website: The searcher wants to find a specific resource.
• Visit in person: The searcher wants to find a location to go to.

Before you start writing, identify which of these four categories your primary keyword target falls under. Then, validate the category by looking at the content currently ranking for the keyword. Are your competitors targeting the same type of search intent you’ve identified for the query? Look at how they’ve structured their content to satisfy searcher needs. Structure your content in a similar and better way. 

Pro Tip: Use SERP Features to Satisfy Searcher Intent Better Than Your Competition

How do you satisfy searcher intent better than your competitors? Pinpoint the aspects of searcher intent that top-ranking articles are failing to satisfy. 

Are there any important nuggets the competition is leaving out that your reader may want to know about? You can clue into what these gaps could be by looking at the “People also ask” and “Related searches” sections of the search engine results page (SERP). Include answers to the relevant queries in your content.

4. Optimize Content to Obtain Google Featured Snippets 

A relatively new search engine feature is the Google Featured Snippet. This SERP feature aims to answer a user’s question immediately. You can optimize your content in a way that increases your chances of obtaining this feature. Here’s how to do it:

• Use SEMrush or another SERP analysis tool to identify if a featured snippet exists for the keyword you’re targeting. Only 12.3 percent of queries have one. 
• Identify how the featured snippet is structured. Is it a paragraph, list, or table ?
• Ask the question the snippet answers in one of your blog post subheadings. 
• Answer the question immediately after the subheading. Write a concise answer that’s better than the current one in the featured snippet. Be sure to use the same structure as the current snippet.

More Tips for Obtaining the Featured Snippet

There are several other tactics you can use to increase your chances of obtaining the featured snippet: 

• Optimize content you’re already ranking high for with a featured snippet answer; 99.58 percent of snippets come from pages already on page one of a SERP.
• Use facts and figures in your answers. 
• Answer multiple “People also ask” questions within your content. Ahrefs found that most featured snippets are triggered by longer-tail keywords like those found in this section of the SERP.

5. Update Old Content

Search engines prioritize fresh content. As previously mentioned, freshness is the fourth most heavily weighted content ranking factor. Updating old blog posts with better, more helpful, and authoritative information can boost rankings and traffic drastically. 

In fact, when HubSpot made updating old content a priority on its editorial calendar (optimizing multiple posts per week), it saw an average increase in organic search views of 106 percent per post .

Here’s how to execute this strategy yourself:

• Identify blog posts with the potential to rank higher for keywords that have substantial search volume.
• Update or rewrite the post to improve accuracy and thoroughness.
• Implement on-page SEO best practices and optimize for conversion with relevant in-line and end-of-post CTAs.
• Publish the optimized article—making sure to change the publish date so that search engines re-crawl and re-index the content.

6. Apply the Skyscraper Method

The Skyscraper method is the process of identifying content you want to outrank and creating something better. It is both a content writing and link-building strategy, but for the purpose of this blog post, we’ll focus on how to execute it in terms of writing.

Once you find the piece of content you want to outrank, you should:

• Think about why Google has prioritized this page in its results. Chances are, the ranking piece of content is comprehensive, goes in-depth, and provides high value to the reader. Understand why the content is performing well so you can take your piece of content to the next level.
• Create something better than the ranking article. You can do this by adding length, depth, freshness, and improving the user experience.

Be strategic and intentional about the improvements you make. Anything you create should first and foremost add value. Ahrefs cautions writers that “adding 25 mediocre tips to an existing list of 25 excellent tips isn’t an improvement. Sure, your new version might be lengthier, but you’re not adding any real value.”

When executed correctly, the Skyscraper method generates results. Brian Dean of Backlinko was able to double organic traffic in 14 days by using the method.

7. Prioritize High-Quality Inbound and Outbound Links

Links tell search engines and users a lot about the value, reputation, and quality of your content. When linking to outbound sources in your blog posts and pillar pages, make sure that they are to trusted, quality websites. When seeking backlinks, target websites that are authorities on the topic you’re writing about. 

Remember that backlinks to your content are one of the most heavily weighted Google ranking factors, dictating 20.94 percent of what ranks versus what doesn’t. High-quality links can drive up rankings and traffic just as much as low-quality and spammy links can hurt your ability to rank. 

8. Boost User Signals with On-Page Best Practices

Over the past few years, Google has started to incorporate User Experience Signals into its search algorithms. The way you use HTML tags in your content can have an indirect impact on these types of signals. 

Because HTML tags are one of the first things search engines crawl to understand what your content is about, content writers need to understand the importance of using the target keyword and LSI keywords in the title, meta description, headings, and first 100 words of a piece of content. Placing keywords in these HTML tags can improve user experience, bounce rate, dwell time, and click-through rate. High performance in these areas has been shown to correlate with higher search engine rankings .

9. Be Aware of Site Structure and Technical SEO Best Practices

Although optimizing site structure and improving technical SEO isn’t necessarily part of a content writer’s job, it’s important to be aware of how these factors can impact your content’s ability to rank. 

How your site is built, page load speed, security, and crawlability all directly impact a search engine’s ability to index and rank your content quickly and accurately. For example, over the past few years, search engines have started prioritizing sites that use a topic cluster-driven site structure —a structure that links blog posts targeting longer-tail keywords to comprehensive resources or pillar pages targeting shorter tail, high-volume seed keywords. 

If you have poor site structure and technical SEO errors, getting your content to rank is next to impossible—no matter how well-written it is. If you’re having a hard time seeing organic traffic results from your well-written content, work with a developer or technical SEO expert to monitor site health and tackle errors that can have the biggest impact on crawlability.

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About the author

Alison Lillie is an Inbound Marketing Strategist at SmartBug Media. Throughout her career, she's helped create lead generation engines for agency clients and in-house departments with Inbound. Prior to SmartBug, she worked for a HubSpot Gold partner agency where she specialized in writing search engine-optimized content for B2B and B2C clients, email marketing, social media management and campaign quality assurance. In her free time, Alison enjoys playing golf in the SoCal sunshine, listening to podcasts and spending time with her standard poodle, Jett! Read more articles by Alison Lillie .

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How To Write SEO Friendly Content (From Beginner To Advanced)

How to write SEO friendly content on your blog.

If you're a new blogger, you may find it challenging to write SEO-friendly content. However, it's important to remember that SEO is just one part of the puzzle when it comes to driving traffic to your blog.

Optimizing your content for search engines can attract more readers and followers interested in what you are writing.

In addition, SEO-friendly content helps you rank higher in search engine results from pages and makes it easier for people to discover your work.

The purpose of a blog post is to inform, educate, or entertain the reader. However, if you want your blog post to be successful, you need to optimize it for search engines.

This means using specific keywords throughout the post so that it ranks higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).

The higher your post ranks, the more likely people will see and read it.

If you're not sure where to start with SEO writing, don't worry, This post today will show you step by step to help you write SEO-friendly content for your article.

There are a few things you should keep in mind when optimizing your blog post for search engines, and that is what I'm about to show you today.

  Also, remember that everything I'm sharing today took me almost two years to learn, but you definitely don't need that much time.

 Now you have a concise summary of all you need to know to generate an attractive, SEO-friendly article.

 All you have to do is take about 8 minutes to read the entire content of this article and take note of critical things and practice.

  The best result is at the end of the article journey.

 And because you're here now. And I know you can do it, and you are worth the effort.

 It is my sincere hope that this art will be the key to bringing your article and your writing career to the next level!

 For more helpful SEO blogs, check out here.

How to start blogging: 6 things you should know before starting blogging

10 Best essential blogging tools for beginners

22 Tips to Create a Successful Business Blog in 2022

What is SEO Writing?

SEO writing is a way of creating content that is optimized for search engines.

This means that the content is written in such a way as to rank highly for relevant keywords and phrases.

SEO writing is essential to any digital marketing strategy, as it can help drive traffic to a website and improve a brand's visibility.

Additionally, SEO writing is not about cramming keywords into your content; instead, it is about creating informative and engaging content that will appeal to both users and search engines.

In order to write SEO-friendly content, you need to understand how search engines work and what kinds of things they look for when ranking websites.

Once you have a good understanding of this, you can start incorporating relevant keywords and phrases into your content in a natural and organic way.

And if you want to learn how to write SEO-friendly content to optimize your blog, check out these tested SEO tips. 

How To Write SEO-Friendly Articles - Content Optimization  

Step 1: start with research..

With an empty head starting to write is a horrible thing . If you really want to get rid of it and do it easily, quickly, and efficiently, then research is a top priority in your first step.

Here are a few things you need to determine to write a different article: 

Target Keyword

Research Topic

Length of the article

Type of the article

Question people also ask

Outline article structure

In SEO, writing good content is the key . And to write SEO-friendly content, we need to prepare many things.

But it can be simpler if you follow the steps I guide below.

Do a favor to yourself and start with a tool such as SEMrush.

  SEMrush offers a 14-day free trial which helps you do your keyword research, find the hot topic, look for backlinking, track the keyword strategy of your competition users, and many more valuable things for content optimization.

  Step 2: Type of content: Keyword Search Intent 

Enter your keyword into Google search to see what kinds of articles are currently ranking.

This is a part of the study and will assist you in understanding the kind of content Google believes is best for these kinds of inquiries.

After clicking “the button finding”, Google will return the search results as shown below.

Should you do the same thing?

Yes. Imitate the success of your predecessors intelligently.

First, determine the primary keyword you use.

Then add one or two of these modifiers from this list:

The current year

Step by step

You can't predict precisely what keywords these modifiers will rank for.

However, you'll receive more search engine traffic from them than you would otherwise.

And that’s what matters. 

Step 3: Research Topic

After coming up with a few keywords for your article, people often struggle to write articles.

It is a blind spot for those who are new to writing.

For example, you have a target keyword, "diet," and you start to think of topics related to it like

A diet suitable for beginners

The best diet for a beautiful body

Why should you have a good diet?

And you pick one of those three ideas and start writing?

No, that's not what I want you to do. Do you remember the purpose of writing SEO-friendly?

That's right, optimizing SEO simply to optimize answers in the most intelligent way to customer questions or concerns.

You should always consider what your audience finds important.

What is going to grab their attention?

What kind of content is going to address their biggest pain points?

Your reader is always wondering what's in it for them

The more accurate and detailed the answer, the higher the click-through rate, ROI, CTA, and ranking on the first page of Google.

What if your topic is not exactly what the customer is looking for? Yes, no one will read it because it's not because they need to.

So how do you find a hot topic that people want to read?

Here how. I use Answer The Public , one of my list's best SEO tools for the blog.

This FREE powerful tool will help you find out more about what your audience is looking for without registering or paying anything.

It immediately generates every helpful phrase and query people post around your term by listening to autocomplete data from search engines like Google.

The five Ws (Who, What, Where, Why) plus “how,” “can,” “are,” “which,” and “will” make up categories.

Awesome! Now you get a lot of perfect topic ideas in just a few seconds.

Those questions are relevant to what people search for on Google, so they're accurate and useful.

If possible, don't choose 1; choose 3-4 questions that match the topic you want to write about, add them to your writing and answer them, and write your readers valuable information, exactly what they need.

Alternatively, you can also use the Topic Research Tool of Semrush . The tool helps to find your reader's interests and displays a vast array of related topics, well-linked article titles, and often-asked questions for your main keyword.

Topic research is a crucial step in the blog optimization process. If you provide material that isn't relevant to their searches, people won't find it or be interested in it.

So save this tip if you don't want to spend more time brainstorming topics for your following articles.

Step 4: Optimize the Length of your article.

How long should a blog post be?

This is a common query among bloggers, but there isn't always a great one.

HubSpot research indicates that 2,100 to 2,400 words are the optimum blog article length for SEO.

However, John Mueller from Google has previously stated that “Word count does not indicate quality"

So, What should we do to have the best-length blog?

Let's see how I usually do here:

Using SEMrush's writing assistant , determine what your idle word limit should be for higher ranking chances.

Enter the target keyword

Select the Country and device you want to target

Click on “Create SEO template"

You will see the result as shown in the screenshot below:

The average word on the first page for my target keyword is 1101.

In order to optimize my SEO article, I would ensure that it contains at least 1100+ words.

Alright, you got an idea about text length for your article.

Now I will show you what you can get more here from SEMrush.

On the dashboard you just saw, besides “Text length,” SEMrush provides you with a lot of helpful info than you expected, like:

The analysis is based on your Google top 10 rivals

Semantically related words

Readability

You see, they show many high-quality keywords, good backlinks, and the score of the top 10 URLs.

This is a lot of work, but if you hope to rank #1 on search, these extra steps will help you stand out from the crowd.

 Step 5: Scout People also ask

First, use Google Autocomplete, which provides keyword suggestions based on user queries.

Furthermore, SEO Ranking has a tool - Keyword Suggestions - that help pick keywords based on the way people search.

Next, Search for your target keyword in Google search, and it’ll show a section called "People also ask."

Here are some of the questions people ask for the “strawberry chocolate" keyword.

Select the inquiries that make sense in light of the purpose of your piece and address them there.

Don't stop there; if you click on one of the questions, then Google will continue to add more.

In this way, you can ensure that your SEO-optimized content answers questions that people are looking for.

So, instead of wondering which SEO tool to buy to use, try searching keywords with this method first.

This method looks very simple but is highly effective. And best of all, it's completely free .

Okay, that's enough; we have enough keywords, right?

In fact, you can optimize your article better if your article contains the long tail keyword .

There are two main reasons why long-tail keywords are essential for SEO

Long tail keywords aren't that competitive

Long tail keywords have high conversion rates

The Long tails are MUCH less competitive than the shorter "head keywords" in terms of SEO. They are, therefore, simpler to rank for.

And the traffic that you get from long tail terms tends to convert really well.

How to find Long Tail Keywords.

Use Google “Searches Related to…”

Have you ever noticed that Google’s search results have a section at the bottom labeled “Searches related”?

Well, this little area is a golden mine for long-tail keyword research.

Let's see the result of the keyword I used above, “strawberry chocolate."

Scroll to the bottom of the page. And here is what you get.

Nice! Now you have a handful of GREAT long tail terms that you can target.

1.   Enter one of the search terms from the "Searches related to..." section into Google.

2.   Check out the results for THAT keyword under "Searches related to..."

3.   Continue doing this until you have a huge list of fantastic keywords.

Alright, it seems like you have almost everything here to start writing SEO-friendly content for your article.

Now, Open Google Docs or Microsoft Word or whatever you use for typing your article. And Outline the article structure on that.

Step 6: Outline the article structure

This is a simple outline for all types of articles you should know

  How to Write a Compelling Intro

A long intro is a traditional way in the past, but now readers do not have much time to read a too-long paragraph.

That's why a short intro with 3 - 5 sentences is enough to hook readers and get them curious about the content they're about to read.

Here are two killer formulas to help you generate a good intro

AIDA (stands for attention, interest, desire, and action)

PAS (stands for problem, agitation, solution)

How to Write a sexy body

You want to impress your customers and stand out in your readers' eyes, but good content is not enough.

The point that makes you different from other writers is that you know how to take advantage of your opponent's knowledge and their writing.

Good, but how?

Check out at least ten blogs by ten different writers, see how they write, the layout of their posts, the images they use, etc., steal some good ideas, and make it yours.

Then optimize your body at least with these things:

Short paragraphs

Section subheaders

Active Voice

Lots of Visuals (screenshots, charts, pictures)

Use bullets and numbered lists

Use transition words

 I love using transition words because it makes paragraphs more intelligently connected, which also helps readers scan through your text and quickly understand information changes between paragraphs.

How to write a good conclusion

  The conclusion is where you help the reader summarize the amount of information they have just read, comment on the main points, and the reader needs to take notes.

 Your conclusion is the final thing your reader will remember about your article. But it shouldn't be too long, and an ideal ending is 3-5 sentences.

Optimize for SEO

Now, it's time to optimize your post for SEO

I use WordPress to guide you step-by-step on optimizing before posting, but this method will still work for you if you're using something else.

Let's get started!

1. Short URLs

When it comes to SEO, short URLs work best.

There are two reasons why short URLs are superior to long URLs

URLs help Google understand your page's topic

The short URL is clean and entices people to click on the blog faster

Well-optimized URLs not only help readers and Google understand what you're writing. It enables you to build a clear information hierarchy on your website.

For example, here is one of our URLs

https://blogs.hyvor.com/blog/multi-language-blog

Here are the elements of this URL:

➔  Protocol: https

➔ Subdomain: blogs

➔  Domain: hyvor.com

➔  Subdirectory : blog

➔  URL Slug : multi-language-blog

Compared to URLs without keywords, URLs with keywords have a higher click-through rate (CTR) than 45%.

Here are some best practices for SEO-friendly URLs.

Keep it as simple as possible

Use subfolders to avoid over-optimization

Make your URL exactly the keyword, and nothing else

Use hyphens instead of underscores

Remove stop-words

Although optimizing URLs is a step that doesn't take too long, it might be a bit of a hassle for newbies.

So, the links below can make sense for you.

You can learn how to create SEO-Friendly URLs (Step-by-Step) here.

2. Unique Meta Description

The Meta Description is a short but extremely accurate introduction to the topic of the entire article, and it's a nice way to get more people to click on your post.

WordPress SEO plugin allows you to write meta descriptions for a post because it plays an important role in search engine ranking and gets more organic traffic for the website.

Specifically, you want your meta description to have the following:

Include relevant keywords.

Describe your content's USP

Fit within 156 characters limit (about 1-2 sentences)

Target an emotion and add a call to action if it’s relevant

Meta descriptions are one of the best ways to attract new visitors , so pay close attention to this optimization step.

If your blog doesn't have a meta description yet, you should start adding it to your blog now.

The meta description is one of the crucial factors in SEO.

You should add it to all of your article posts. If your pre-published articles still don't have a meta description, go to the edit section and add one.

By adding meta descriptions, Google can read and understand the content in your description. The article will have an easier chance of ranking high in top answer search queries and bringing more eyes to your web pages. 

3. Title Tag and Slug

First, you need to know the difference between a Title tag and a Slug

Title tag: how the audience sees the title of the post on your website

Slug: summarizes the main content of the website and usually stands behind the domain name

If you omit the Slug in the SEO optimization section, your article will be restricted from the ranking by Google.

Slug optimization is a necessity for SEO.

Slug is an integral part of the URL and, when combined with the domain name, will form a permalink link that leads to the source page of the website.

It can be said that the Slug optimization process is similar to creating SEO-friendly URLs.

What about the title tag?

Title tag helps users and search engines quickly and accurately capture a website's topic.

Conditions for a standard SEO Title tag

Do not capitalize the entire title tag

Keep your title less than 66 characters

It does not 100% match the title of another post

Include the main keyword

A good title tag is an excellent opportunity for you to score points in the eyes of the audience, helping you make the first impression on the reader.

By including a keyword in the title tag, Google will recognize your site faster .

However, this does not mean that you need to use the exact main keyword at the beginning of the title tag. Google is smart enough to understand a standard SEO title tag.

You can learn how to optimize a title tag for readers here

How to Optimize Your Title Tag for SEO

4. Internal Links & External Links

Let's see how the two links are different:

Internal Links: internal links from one page to another on the same website.

External Links: to link your article with articles or information from other websites.

 External links are divided into two types: Inbound Links and Outbound Links.

Inbound Link: also known as Backlink, is a link that points to your website from other websites

Outbound Links: are links to other websites from your website that convert

Inbound and outbound Links are the 2 main types of External Links

Why Internal Links is important?

Internal Links are key for any website that wants higher rankings in Google.

It helps Google find, index, and know all of the pages on your site.

Let's say you publish a new article about your market sector. All you have to do is choose a relevant article and link it to your recent article.

In this way, it provides additional information to the reader, improves the number of views per session, and boosts your organic traffic.

But don't over-link; 3-8 links are good enough.

In short: The more you create internal links, the more you create SEO energy for your website.

Why are External Links important?

By linking to other websites, it is possible to improve your website's authority significantly.

Provided that the websites you link to need to have a high level of authority (not spammy sites).

Here is how to check whether the website link you should link or not.

If your website is new, you should link with other external links with a high Domain Authority (over 60).

Domain Authority is the authority or trustworthiness of a website, and obviously linking to such a website will help Google rate your article positively.

Pro Tip: I use the Ubersuggest extension for checking Domain Authority. And it is completely FREE for everyone. If you haven't used this awesome tool, add it now.

5. Image Alt Attribute

Image SEO is the practice of optimizing images for your articles to make it easier for Google to find and rank them in image search.

But the thing is, Google can't read images.

Text is how Google realizes an image.

That is why, when you use images, you need to make sure to optimize all images in your article so that search engines can understand what the image is.

Here are seven ways to make your images SEO-friendly:

Original images: Use Canva to make your image look more beautiful

High-quality photos: It is more appealing than blurry, unclear images

Images optimized for speed: The overall size of the image is not should be larger than necessary. Use Pixlr X for resizing and compression

Supported image formats: Google Images bear the following formats: PNG, SVG, JPEG, WebP, GIF, and BMP

File names: Google extracts information about images from the page's content, including their file names.

For example, People often upload images with names like image003.jpg

It was a big mistake!

When you name an image, use something related to the image.

For example, when you save an image from Hyvor, and you name the image "Hyvor," it will not be targeted. Instead, name it this way "Hyvor - Inbound Links" or "Hyvor - Outbound Links."

This way, when people search for images on Google image search, they will quickly see relevant Hyvor pictures in the website's blog posts. 

6. H1, H2, H3 Headings

Using the right heading tags is crucial for SEO since they assist Google in understanding your content.

Otherwise, the Heading will make your website more user-friendly by making your information more legible and accessible.

For H1, you should use it only once on each post .

The H1 heading is the name/title of the post.

For example, on this page, is “How To Write SEO Friendly Content (From Beginner To Advanced).”

Then, you can use an H2 heading, H3 heading, H4 heading, and so on.

High-performing articles are more likely to have both H2 and H3 tags and to be well-structured.

Structure the article such that it is simpler for the reader to understand the material, but don't go overboard by adding too many subheadings.

As an example, think of header tags as the book's table of contents:

H1 introduces the subject of your page, much like the book's name.

H2 is a book chapter - the main subjects of the article are covered in sections

H3 to H6 act as extra subheadings, similar to how a book chapter may be divided into several subtopics.

If you need a catchy H1 for your article, here is what you need to consider:

Use words like: “how,” “why," and “where" - guides and how-to articles drive 2x more traffic than other types

Use numbers like “Top 5”, “10 Best",..etc. - articles with list headlines get 2x more social shares than other types

All the top websites use this heading structure as a great SEO technique in order to rank.

When creating a long post, it is especially wise to employ appropriate header tags for SEO purposes.

The SEO community advises using your keywords in the H1, H2, and H3 tags. You should choose the header tags for your outline at this stage (during the research process).

For more information on using heading tags in blog posts, please see heading tags for SEO .

7. Grammar and Spelling

Your blog contains perfect keywords and great optimized content, but your grammar and spelling are not good?

The bad news is if you have a lot of typos or errors in your post, it might rank your content lower than other search engines.

The good news is that Google’s bots don’t care much about spelling or grammar mistakes. However, as I said, typos and errors can still create a problem for search engines.

And if your article is over 2000 words long, you won't want to waste time checking every single typo.

Here is the solution.

Use the Grammarly tool to help you save time and keep your article in the best condition.

Grammarly is free , but they also offer a premium for more function. This tool will pick up spelling and grammar mistakes better than any other checker.

Aside from spelling and grammar, it may check for syntax errors and suggest contextual improvements. You can use it to ensure your written blogs are error-free.

One more thing!

Friendly content or readability is also vital for both reader and SEO-optimized content.

Readability is vital in online content and can greatly improve your SEO results. Google usually checks the readability of your content.

You can establish authority, attract attention, and effectively communicate your message with high readability.

If your article is too difficult to read, you can not achieve higher rankings.

Here is what you should do to improve your readability

Use Hemmingway Editor

Simply copy and paste all your text into the Hemmingway Editor, or you can download the desktop app.

Then the app will show you the scale of your writing (ideally 4-7 points). It will highlight sentences you need to edit, including adverbs, passive voice, simpler alternative phrases, and hard-to-read sentences.

Using Hemmingway , you can ensure your blogs have an appropriate reading grade for the intended audience. 

8. Optimized Your Content For Mobile

According to WebFX, there are over 40% of transactions happen on mobile, and people spend 70% of their internet time on mobile.

To attract and retain mobile users, you should invest in mobile search engine optimization (SEO).

Optimizing your mobile site will rank better in search results and keep mobile leads on your site.

Before you make drastic changes to improve your mobile SEO or your customer's mobile SEO, do this

check to see if your site is mobile-friendly or not?

Using Google's mobile page testing tool is easy to test mobile-friendliness.

Go directly to the website or search for the mobile-friendly test on Google.

All you need to do is enter the URL of the page you want to test and click "Test URL."

The best part is that you can determine how mobile-friendly your site is without loading every page on your phone or other mobile devices.

This will evaluate how mobile-friendly your website is and classify URLs based on problems they may have.

Once your mobile-friendly research is finished, you'll have a better sense of the work you need to perform for your mobile SEO strategy. 

9. Update Your Content Regularly

Google frequently updates its algorithms to provide the searcher with the best and most relevant results.

So if your website is not converting and your online traffic isn't rising, you may need to rewrite the content.

By doing this effectively, you will improve your rankings, leading to more traffic.

You don't have to deal with the headache of maintaining your website on your own all the time.

There are many resources available to you for assistance, regardless of whether you wish to share regular blog entries or occasionally update one or two pages.

Hiring a freelance writer is a great way to solve this problem for you.

Even if you are a freelancer, you can still hire other freelancers to work for you for a reasonable price. 

Ready to write SEO-friendly content?

It’s time to get started on your SEO writing to-do list! Whether writing new content or updating existing content, these tips will help you write for SEO and improve your ranking.

Final Checklist:

Start with research keyword

Optimized the length of the article

Google search relevant keyword

Make an outline article structure

Write a unique Meta-description

Post a catchy Title tag

Add internal links and external links

Image Alt Attribute

Use H1, H2, H3 Heading

Grammar and Spelling check

Optimized content mobile

Update blog regularly

Now we want to hear from you.

What do you think of this guide?

Let us know if we missed something or if you have any suggestions, comment below for sharing. We love to hear from you!

Blog Post SEO FAQ

Do blog posts help SEO?

There is a lot of debate in the SEO world about the value of blog posts. Some people believe they are essential to ranking well in search engines, while others believe they are a waste of time. The truth is blog posts can help your SEO if they are done correctly.

How do I make content SEO-Optimized?

Recheck our post, and you will find the best answer. Or see a mini summary of things you can do for writing for SEO.

Use keyword-rich titles and descriptions

Do your keyword research

Make sure your website is mobile-friendly

Format your content properly

Why is optimizing content important?

There are a number of reasons why optimizing content is essential. First and foremost, it helps to ensure that as many people see your content as possible. Secondly, it can help to improve your search engine rankings, which can, in turn, lead to more traffic and higher conversion rates. Finally, optimized content is better quality, making it more likely to engage and retain readers.

What is a content optimization tool?

A content optimization tool is software that helps you optimize your content for the web. It analyzes your content and provides suggestions on how to improve it for better search engine ranking, social media engagement, and overall user experience. A good content optimization tool will help you identify areas of improvement and give you actionable steps to take to fix them.

How many keywords should I use for SEO?

This question lacks a definite response. The number of keywords you should use for SEO will depend on various factors, including your industry, the competition level, and the search engine algorithms. A good rule of thumb is to target two to three keyword phrases per page. By doing this, you'll improve your position on search engine result pages (SERPs) and increase traffic to your website.

Should I use the same keywords on every page?

When it comes to using keywords on your website, there is no simple solution. Each website and each page is different, so you will need to use your best judgment to figure out what keyword(s) to use. However, you should keep a few things in mind that will help you make the best decision for your website.

Use pertinent keywords throughout your website if you want to score well on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Don't stuff your keywords! This will not only turn off potential customers but also get you penalized by Google. Use keywords sparingly and only when they are relevant to the content on the page.

Choose your keywords carefully. Consider the keywords that prospective clients would use to find a company like yours.

Let us know if we missed something or if you have any suggestions, comment below for sharing. We love to hear from you.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide

When you built your website, you likely created it with your users in mind, trying to make it easy for them to find and explore your content. One of those users is a search engine, which helps people discover your content. SEO—short for search engine optimization—is about helping search engines understand your content, and helping users find your site and make a decision about whether they should visit your site through a search engine.

The Search Essentials outline the most important elements of what makes your website eligible to appear on Google Search. While there's no guarantee that any particular site will be added to Google's index, sites that follow the Search Essentials are more likely to show up in Google's search results . SEO is about taking the next step and working on improving your site's presence in Search . This guide will walk you through some of the most common and effective improvements you can do on your site.

There are no secrets here that'll automatically rank your site first in Google (sorry!). In fact some of the suggestions might not even apply to your business, but following the best practices will hopefully make it easier for search engines (not just Google) to crawl, index, and understand your content.

How does Google Search work?

Google is a fully automated search engine that uses programs called crawlers to explore the web constantly, looking for pages to add to our index. You usually don't need to do anything except publish your site on the web. In fact, the vast majority of sites listed in our results are found and added automatically as we crawl the web. If you're hungry for more, we have documentation about how Google discovers, crawls, and serves web pages .

How long until I see impact in search results?

Every change you make will take some time to be reflected on Google's end. Some changes might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months. In general, you likely want to wait a few weeks to assess whether your work had beneficial effects in Google Search results. Keep in mind that not all changes you make to your website will result in noticeable impact in search results; if you're not satisfied with your results and your business strategies allow it, try iterating with the changes and see if they make a difference.

Help Google find your content

Before you actually do anything mentioned in this section, check if Google has already found your content (maybe you don't need to do anything!). Try searching on Google for your site with the site: search operator . If you see results pointing to your site, you're in the index. For example, a search for site:wikipedia.org returns these results . If you don't see your site, check out the technical requirements to make sure there's nothing technically preventing your site from showing in Google Search, and then come back here.

Google primarily finds pages through links from other pages it already crawled. In many cases, these are other websites that are linking to your pages. Other sites linking to you is something that happens naturally over time, and you can also encourage people to discover your content by promoting your site .

If you're open to a little technical challenge, you could also submit a sitemap —which is a file that contains all the URLs on your site that you care about. Some content management systems (CMS) may even do this automatically for you. However this isn't required, and you should first focus on making sure people know about your site .

Check if Google can see your page the same way a user does

When Google crawls a page, it should ideally see the page the same way an average user does . For this, Google needs to be able to access the same resources as the user's browser. If your site is hiding important components that make up your website (like CSS and JavaScript ), Google might not be able to understand your pages, which means they might not show up in search results or rank well for the terms you're targeting.

If your pages have different information depending on the user's physical location, make sure you're satisfied with the information that Google sees from its crawler's location, which is generally the US.

To check how Google sees your page, use the URL Inspection Tool in Search Console .

Don't want a page in Google's search results?

It might be important for you to opt out your site as a whole or sections of it from appearing in search results. For example, you might not want your posts about your new embarrassing haircut to show up in search results. Google supports various ways that lets you opt out of crawling and indexing of your URLs. If you need to block some files, directories, or even your whole site from Google Search, check out our guide about ways to prevent content from appearing in search results .

Organize your site

When you're setting up or redoing your site, it can be good to organize it in a logical way because it can help search engines and users understand how your pages relate to the rest of your site. Don't drop everything and start reorganizing your site right now though: while these suggestions can be helpful long term (especially if you're working on a larger website), search engines will likely understand your pages as they are right now, regardless of how your site is organized.

Use descriptive URLs

Parts of the URL can be displayed in search results as breadcrumbs, so users can also use the URLs to understand whether a result will be useful for them.

Google learns breadcrumbs automatically based on the words in the URL, but you can also influence them with structured data if you like a technical challenge. Try to include words in the URL that may be useful for users; for example:

https://www.example.com/pets/cats.html

A URL that only contains random identifiers is less helpful for users; for example:

https://www.example.com/2/6772756D707920636174

Group topically similar pages in directories

If you have more than a few thousand URLs on your site, how you organize your content may have effects on how Google crawls and indexes your site. Specifically, using directories (or folders) to group similar topics can help Google learn how often the URLs in individual directories change.

For example, consider the following URLs:

https://www.example.com/policies/return-policy.html

https://www.example.com/promotions/new-promos.html

The content in the policies directory seldomly changes, however the content in the promotions directory likely changes very often. Google can learn this information and crawl the different directories at different frequencies. To learn more about search-friendly site structures, check out our guide for ecommerce sites , for which a good URL structure is more important as they tend to be larger.

Reduce duplicate content

Some websites show the same content under different URLs, which is called duplicate content . Search engines choose a single URL (the canonical URL) to show users, per piece of content.

Having duplicate content on your site is not a violation of our spam policies, but it can be a bad user experience and search engines might waste crawling resources on URLs that you don't even care about. If you're feeling adventurous, it's worth figuring out if you can specify a canonical version for your pages. But if you don't canonicalize your URLs yourself, Google will try to automatically do it for you.

When working on canonicalization, try to ensure that each piece of content on your site is only accessible through one individual URL; having two pages that contain the same information about your promotions can be a confusing user experience (for example, people might wonder which is the right page, and whether there's a difference between the two).

If you have multiple pages that have the same information, try setting up a redirect from non-preferred URLs to a URL that best represents that information. If you can't redirect, use the rel="canonical" link element instead. But again, don't worry too much about this; search engines can generally figure this out for you on their own most of the time.

Make your site interesting and useful

Creating content that people find compelling and useful will likely influence your website's presence in search results more than any of the other suggestions in this guide. While "compelling and useful content" can mean different things to different people, content like this generally shares some common attributes, such as:

• The text is easy-to-read and well organized : Write content naturally and make sure the content is well written, easy to follow, and free of spelling and grammatical mistakes. Break up long content into paragraphs and sections, and provide headings to help users navigate your pages.
• The content is unique : When you're writing new content, don't copy others' content in part or in its entirety: create the content yourself based on what you know about the topic. Don't just rehash what others already published.
• The content is up-to-date : Check in on previously published content and update it as needed, or even delete it if it's not relevant anymore.
• The content is helpful, reliable, and people-first : Be sure that you're writing content that your readers will find helpful and reliable. For example, providing expert or experienced sources can help people understand your articles' expertise.

Expect your readers' search terms

Think about the words that a user might search for to find a piece of your content. Users who know a lot about the topic might use different keywords in their search queries than someone who is new to the topic. For example, some users might search for "charcuterie", while others might search for "cheese board". Anticipating these differences in search behavior and writing with your readers in mind could produce positive effects on how your site performs in search results.

However, don't worry if you don't anticipate every variation of how someone might seek your content. Google's language matching systems are sophisticated and can understand how your page relates to many queries, even if you don't explicitly use the exact terms in them.

Avoid distracting advertisements

While ads are a part of the internet and are meant to be seen by users, don't let them become overly distracting or prevent your users from reading your content. For example, advertisements, or interstitial pages (pages displayed before or after the content you're expecting) that make it difficult to use the website.

Link to relevant resources

Links are a great way to connect your users and search engines to other parts of your site, or relevant pages on other sites. In fact, the vast majority of the new pages Google finds every day are through links, making links a crucial resource you need to consider to help your pages be discovered by Google and potentially shown in search results. Additionally, links can also add value by connecting users (and Google) to another resource that corroborates what you're writing about.

Write good link text

Link when you need to

Links can provide more context on a topic, both for users and search engines, which may help demonstrate your knowledge on a topic. However when you're linking to pages outside of your control, for example content on other sites, make sure you trust the resource you're linking to. If you can't trust the content and you still want to link to them, add a nofollow or similar annotation to the link to avoid search engines associating your site with the site you're linking to. This helps avoid potential negative consequences in your rankings in Google Search.

If you're accepting user-generated content on your site, such as forum posts or comments, make sure every link that's posted by users has a nofollow or similar annotation automatically added by your CMS. Since you're not creating the content in this case, you likely don't want your site to be blindly associated with the sites users are linking to. This can also help discourage spammers from abusing your website.

Influence how your site looks in Google Search

A typical Google Search results page consists of a few different visual elements that you can influence to help users decide whether they should visit your site through those search results. In this section, we're focusing on the title link and the snippet because these are the more visually significant elements.

Influence your title links

The title link is the headline part of the search result and it can help people decide which search result to click. There are a few sources that Google uses to generate this title link, including the words inside the <title> element (also called the title text) and other headings on the page. This title text can also be used for the title that's shown in browsers and bookmarks.

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You can influence the title links in Search by writing good titles: a good title is unique to the page, clear and concise, and accurately describes the contents of the page. For example, your title could include the name of your website or business, other bits of important information like the physical location of the business, and maybe some information about what the particular page has to offer for users. Our documentation about title links has more tips about how to create good titles and how to influence your site's search results' title links.

Control your snippets

Below the title link, a search result typically has a description of the target page to help users decide whether they should click the search result. This is called a snippet .

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The snippet is sourced from the actual content of the page the search result is linking to, thus you have complete control over the words that can be used to generate the snippet. Occasionally the snippet may be sourced from the contents of the meta description tag, which is typically a succinct, one- or two-sentence summary of the page. A good meta description is short, unique to one particular page, and includes the most relevant points of the page. Check out our tips for writing good meta descriptions for more inspiration.

Add images to your site, and optimize them

Many people search visually, and images can be how people find your website for the first time. For example, if you have a recipe blog, people might find your content by searching for "fruit tart recipes" and browsing photos of various types of fruit tarts.

As you add images to your site, make sure that people and search engines can find and understand them.

Add high-quality images near relevant text

When you use high quality images, you give users enough context and detail to decide which image best matches what they were looking for. For example, if people are looking for "daisies" and come across a rogue edelweiss in search results, a higher quality image would help them distinguish the type of flower.

Use images that are sharp and clear, and place them near text that's relevant to the image. The text that's near images can help Google better understand what the image is about and what it means in context to your page.

For example, if the page is reviewing yarn shops in London, then it would make sense to embed one of your photos of the yarn shop in the section that details the location, description, and review information for that yarn shop. This helps Google and users associate the image with text that provides more context to what the page is about.

Add descriptive alt text to the image

Alt text is a short, but descriptive piece of text that explains the relationship between the image and your content. It helps search engines understand what your image is about and the context of how your image relates to your page, so writing good alt text is quite important. You can add this to your HTML with the alt attribute of the img element, or your CMS may have an easy way to specify a description for an image when you're uploading it to your site. Learn more about how to write good alt text , and how to add it to your images.

Optimize your videos

If your website includes pages that are primarily about individual videos, people may also be able to discover your site through video results in Google Search. Many of the best practices for images and text also apply to videos:

• Create high-quality video content, and embed the video on a standalone page, near text that's relevant to that video.
• Write descriptive text in the titles and description fields of a video (the title of a video is still a title, and so you can apply the best practices for writing titles here too).

If your site is particularly video-focused, then continue reading about more things you can do to optimize your videos for search engines .

Promote your website

Effectively promoting your new content will lead to faster discovery by those who are interested in the same subject, and also by search engines. You can do this in many ways:

• Social media promotion
• Community engagement
• Advertisement, both offline and online
• Word of mouth, and many other methods

One of the most effective and lasting ways is word of mouth: that is, people familiar with your site tell their friends about it, who in turn visit your site. This can take time, and usually you need to invest some time and effort in other practices first, such as community engagement. Our friends over at Google for Creators have excellent resources about building and engaging your audience .

Putting effort into the offline promotion of your company or site can also be rewarding. For example, if you have a business site, make sure its URL is listed on your business cards, letterhead, posters, and other materials. With their permission, you could also send out recurring newsletters to your audience letting them know about new content on your website.

As with everything in life, you can overdo promoting your site and actually harm it: people may get fatigued of your promotions, and search engines may perceive some of the practices as manipulation of search results .

Things we believe you shouldn't focus on

As SEO has evolved, so have the ideas and practices (and at times, misconceptions) related to it. What was considered best practice or top priority in the past may no longer be relevant or effective due to the way search engines (and the internet) have developed over time.

To help you focus on the things that are actually important when it comes to SEO, we collected some of the most common and prominent topics we've seen circulating the internet. In general, our message on these topics is that you should do what's best for your business area; we will elaborate on a few specific points here:

• Get started with Search Console : Setting up a Search Console account helps you monitor and optimize how your website performs on Google Search. Learn how to set up your account and what reports to check out first .
• Maintain your website's SEO over time : Learn more about managing your site's presence in the long term , including more in-depth SEO tasks and scenarios, such as preparing for a site move, or managing a multi-lingual site.
• Enhance how your site looks in Google Search results : Valid structured data on your pages also makes your pages eligible for many special features in Google Search results, including review stars, carousels, and more. Explore the gallery of search result types that your page can be eligible for.

Stay informed and ask questions

As you embark on your SEO journey, here are some resources that can help you stay on top of changes and new resources we publish:

Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License , and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License . For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies . Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

Last updated 2024-06-04 UTC.

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