Your SEO strategy for web content is the backbone of your online visibility and reputation. When writing content, taking SEO techniques and rules into consideration will allow you to create informative content that is not only valuable for internet readers but also in accordance with the ranking criteria of search engines like Google.
To help you with your SEO content writing mission on your business blog, we have listed basic and essential tips you can apply for your next content. These include the best practices that you need to adopt to give you a boost for your next campaigns.
Best Content Writing Practices
Quality content is one that is aimed at a specific audience. It won’t be right for everyone, but it will surely give value to its target readers. Good content generates curiosity, interest, builds up engagement, and even debates. Here are more benefits of quality content:
- They drive traffic to your site;
- They will improve your position/ranking on search engines;
- They will generate leads;
- They will bring sales in the medium term;
- And more importantly, they will help position you as an expert, a specialist in your field.
So here are our 10 tips for creating great content:
- Create a content calendar and make sure to follow it.
An editorial calendar is a schedule for when you will publish your written content. By adding an editorial calendar in your workflow, you can organize your content and your workflow (what to write, when to edit, where to publish, and when to do it), brainstorm new ideas and make sure that your ideas are valuable and timely.
- Always have a goal in mind.
Don’t write content just for the sake of publishing. Many fall into the trap of creating content for the sake of stuffing keywords and hoping to rank easily on search engines. But most of the time, these kinds of content do not get many reads.
By setting a goal in mind, like how many you would want to reach with your content and how many reads/website visits you want to achieve, you’ll know better how to distribute it and you will be obliged to write content that matters.
Strive for excellence for every content you publish.
- Curate good content.
Curating good content involves reading other content (blogs, tweets, infographics, etc.), reorganizing the things you’ve learned, adding more factual information, and seasoning it with your own knowledge/expertise.
You need to curate content that is timely and which many people are curious and interested in. As much as possible, add more value than the ones you’ve read before, this way, you won’t bore your audience with repeated content.
- Never duplicate content
If it is innocuous to plagiarize a few pages of a site alone, we are sad to say you’re mistaken. Google considers duplicate material to be heavily sanctioned in its indexing criteria! If you don’t want to risk the sandbox and see your site land on the 30th page of Google search results (where no one goes), we recommend that you write your content yourself.
Original content, produced in accordance with the principles of your editorial line and following the tone of your brand will always be the best option to feed your site.
- Learn to adapt your tone of voice to various social media platforms.
Using the right tone for communicating with different users of various social media platforms will help you communicate with them better. If you can help your readers perceive that you can relate to them and you can speak their language, it’ll be easier to gain their trust and confidence.
For example, it is okay to use a neutral tone of voice when publishing or posting in Facebook while LinkedIn needs you to use a more professional/formal tone. Twitter is so fast-paced that you need to be more attention-grabbing while Instagram is calm where people can stop and take in important information.
If you adjust your content/posts based on this knowledge, you will for sure gain more readers and following.
- Develop a good content structure.
Before starting to write the content, think about how you are going to structure the post. Surely you know that most of the time, people prefer to just skim rather than read the content entirely. Make sure that your titles and subtitles are interesting and valuable enough. Hook them on the first paragraph and you can retain them a little longer.
- Write simply.
Your content probably is not only useful to US readers but also for other readers worldwide. Nowadays, we need to also cater to readers internationally, of all ages, and nationalities. This is why you should avoid using highfalutin words, and adjust your vocabulary into ones that many can understand easily. You also need to build short sentences and paragraphs so that your content is easier to understand.
Building a good content structure can assist with this. By dividing your ideas into small parts, enumerating them, putting them into a list, and making short sections, your content will be easier to read and absorb.
- Make the post search engine friendly (SEO)
This is a fact: most content is curated for SEO; you can’t deny this nor this is taboo. We create content for the sake of SEO and for it to be recognized as the relevant content for a specific niche or topic. Add relevant keywords, optimize your content structure, use the correct headings, and distribute it to gain engagements and more traffic.
To learn more about these strategies further, here are our tips on how to write good, high-quality content for SEO.
SEO Content Writing Tips
- Write a good title tag
Your title tags appear in many places: in your browser tab, Search Engine Results Pages (SERP), On your blog posts, and possibly on other sites where you have links for that specific content. You should optimize your content titles well and if possible, add your target keywords in your title tag. You must also write it in a way that is relevant to your content in general.
For a better click-through rate, it is best that you write titles that assume to give readers good information. The 5 Ws and 1H (What, When, Where, Who, Why, and How) rule in writing titles is still as effective as it was many years ago. Having words like ‘Reviews,’ ‘Updates,’ and ‘Statistics’ are also catchy and interesting for readers with specific needs.
- Write interesting and/or informative meta descriptions
Meta descriptions are short descriptions of your content that you can find below your titles in the SERPs. You can optimize it by writing a description with at least 120 characters in length, with keywords, and with enough information that will pique readers’ interest.
- Optimized content is structured content
The content of your web page doesn’t have to be content with an unreadable, soulless block of text. Structuring your text will make it easier to read for the Internet user but will also guide robots in their understanding of your text.
- Optimize the Hn tags by integrating key expressions into them.
- Go for a catchy H1 (question titles are on the rise).
- Focus on an evocative introduction of around 100 words.
- Create relevant H2 and H3 captions that explore the details of the topic.
- Write informative paragraphs.
The content must be ventilated to facilitate the scanned reading of the Internet user. Creating lists (<li> </ li>) and bolding (<b> </b>) certain keywords will help in this direction and shape more SEO Friendly text.
- Stop the practice of keyword stuffing
Referencing the very same keyword hundreds of times with the hopes of ranking in user searches is really no longer effective. Aside from the fact that the content ends up unreadable for users, keyword stuffing makes content unqualified to be of good value.
It is better to strategically add your focus keyword at least 2-4 times within your content and 1-2x of other relevant, long-tail keywords. This way, you can still add your keywords while maintaining your content readable.
- Add internal links
It is essential to embed internal links in your content in order to guide Google robots and Internet users in the deeper exploration of your site. Today, the internal connection approach is popular: The semantic cocoon method. A minimal set of guidelines must be followed when creating an internal connection:
- Link anchors should be placed on terms that are relevant to the link’s target content. As a result, a connection to our agency page can be placed on a link anchor such as “SEO agency.” In SEO, the link to “Learn more” should be ignored.
- Put links on lengthy keywords rather than entire phrases.
- Do not overuse links, and adjust their quantity depending on the quality of the content.
- Do not use the same link more than once in a similar text.
If you’ve spent a lot of time in content writing, you already know how difficult it is to curate and manage a content management workflow. So here, we leave you with some SEO tools to make your posts brilliant and your campaigns manageable.
SEO Content Writing Tools and Platforms
This is a WordPress plugin that automatically optimizes your titles. It allows you to write as many titles as you want, these will be shown to your visitors and when they are shared with other people, the plugin will show you the most suitable one and will allow you to choose the one with the best statistics.
CopyAI is a tool using Artificial Intelligence to help content writers by suggesting unique and engaging content marketing copy. SEO copywriting is not an easy task, but with this tool’s deep learning capabilities, you will gain better results and access to content that understands the desire of your readers.
Removal.AI is a background remover tool and can help you create images for your content. With this tool, you can save more time and money for your background removal needs.
To use this tool, just upload your photo that you want and let the tool do its job. After that, you can edit and place a new background that will fit your subjects better. You can also add some texts (ex.your title/subheading title) to help your readers know about your content.
Best alternative to Canva, this tool is an all-in-one online design tool with a huge graphics library – from images to icons and illustrations, templates and more. Designing images for your social media posts, blogs, and web copies takes a lot of time especially if you are not a designer. With Pixelied online photo editor, you can download stunning images in seconds.
This is really cool, if you don’t want to waste a lot of time and you regularly use Buffer to share on social networks, you will love this page, it is a small editing tool that allows you to create messages very quickly and schedule their publication if you are in a hurry it will taste great to you.
The gif is in fashion and with this tool, you will catch up, you can find animated gifs that fit what you are looking for or create your own. You will find them by category or see the creations of artists, you can also create yours and you can add effects and filters, then embedding them in your post will be sewing and singing.
This online tool is very similar to Buffer, but the concept is different, you classify your content and schedule your publications by categories and at one stroke you can see how your schedule of scheduled content is occupied. You can access a free trial plan for a few days.
Start Writing Now…
To develop yourself in writing good content for your website, you must practice it again and again, just like any other ability. These short instructions will not turn you into a great author. They can, however, assist and thus, you will get more pleasure composing and will be compelled to write more frequently. This is how you make time for writing training. This is precisely what you’ll do if you want to be successful at it.
To go further, find out how to get your readers hooked. This article on web writing is not as fun as we initially imagined it to be. But we hope you picked up a couple of quick tips that you think are easy to implement. Start writing now!
