How To Write SEO Friendly Content Checklist

8 Steps To Write SEO Friendly Content Checklist

Looking for specific steps to boost organic traffic to your website? In order to rank your website on search engines, you need to produce great SEO friendly content on your website. Optimised content will get you more traffic, more clicks, shares and customer engagement.

What is SEO friendly content?

It’s content that is created in a way that helps search engine to rank it high.

SEO is an essential aspect of your content marketing and you need to implement best practices when planning writing content for your website. Writing SEO friendly content is an art that could take your business to the next level.

In this article, I will share with you 8 tips for writing SEO-optimised articles that rank better in search engines.

Step by step checklist to writing SEO friendly content

1. Keyword Research
2. Determine the search intent
3. Create an optimised SEO Title
4. Optimise your URL
5. Optimise the page meta-description
6. Create a catchy H1 and a readable content structure
7. Add optimised images and video
8. Add internal links to other existing content

#1. Start with Keyword Research

Each page of your website or each blog article should target one primary keyword (also named as the focus keyword). And it also has to target 5-10 additional keywords.

One tip for finding the focus keyword is for a blog is to ask yourself one question: What is my audience looking for? Ideally, you want to pick a keyword that has a high search volume and low keyword difficulty.

#2. Determine the search intent

Search intent is the why behind a search query. We explained in our what is search intent previous blog and how to optimise your page for search intent.

Why is your reader make the search that got him to your page? Does he want to read something? Is he looking to make a purchase? You can identify the keyword search intent by clues in the page title.

#3. Create an optimised SEO Title

The blog title should correspond to the search intent and should contain the focus keyword. Length: 15-45 characters (max 60 characters)

#4. Optimise your URL

Your URL should be easy to read, short and should contain the focus keyword. You should optimise your URL because it provides valuable information to search engines about the content of a page and its content.

#5. Optimise the page meta-description

The meta description is a summary of your content that Google uses to show beneath your title in the search results. A good meta description should target emotion and encourage readers to click your blog post.

The meta description should explain your article and should include the focus keyword.

The optimal length for a good meta description: 1-2 sentences (140-160 characters)

#6. Create a catchy H1 and a readable content structure

The H1 heading for an article is similar to a book title, while the other headings (H2, H3) are similar to the chapters of the book. A good H1 may contain words like “how to”, “why”, “what” or numbers “7 steps”, “top 10 things”

Other content tips:

• try to keep the paragraphs relatively short (1-3 sentences): one paragraph = one idea
• Add bullet points and numbered lists
• highlight main ideas with bold, italic, or a change in font style/size

#7. Add optimised images and video

Images are essential to making the content interesting. Adding and optimising images in our content is a great way to improve your reader’s experience. You need to optimise your image size (to make it load faster), optimise your image names (make them unique and relevant) and optimise image Alt tags (make them related to the content topic and describe what an image shows).

Textual content is great. But visuals, like videos, give your website life and personality. However, adding videos to your website is a double-edged sword. Visitors to your website would love the visual content. But if your site isn’t optimized properly to handle heavy multimedia content, your conversion rates might drop.

First and foremost, you need to optimize the video file itself, so its effect on your site’s page speed is minimal. And then you need to optimize the web page to do proper embedding and display of video content.

#8. Add internal links to other existing content

Internal linking helps your reader to get more in-depth information about a specific topic while staying focused on the main point (the focus keyword). Also helps search engines to understand the relevance of your content and to index and rank your blog.

Conclusion

Follow those steps next time when you write any content to make it SEO friendly for Google and interesting for the reader.

Dorin

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