It’s awesome to be on top, especially if your business is the first thing people would see on the first page of search engine results. But what does it take to be number one?
There are a lot of tips and tricks on our sleeve and creating SEO-friendly content is one of the best things that you can do. Once you get the hang of it, it will be a piece of cake for you.
Here are some of our tips that will help increase your search engine rankings!
1. What’s the message?
What do you want to convey to your readers, followers, or customers? What’s the reason for creating the blog or article? What do you want them to feel after reading it? Feel free to jot it down before starting anything else.
2. Create a structure.
While thinking about the message of your content, make a clear and definite structure. Always remember that each content should have an introduction, body, and conclusion.
Make use of headings to improve its readability. To give a clear indication to your readers, feel free to use signal words like first of all, secondly, and finally. Once this is done, you can now start writing!
3. Divide and conquer.
Some of your readers, followers, or customers may have short attention span and you will have to put this into consideration when creating your content. Make sure to divide your posts into short paragraphs (with more or less 3 sentences each) because reading a very long paragraph is not very appealing.
4. Optimize your content.
If you want to be an authority in your field, make sure to write content with at least 300 words. The longer your content, the better! Always take into consideration your keyword or keywords which should be 1-2% of your texts and evenly-spread across your content. If possible, the keyword or keywords should be found on the title, the first sentence, within the body, the last sentence, and etc.
5. Link your latest content to your previous content.
If you’ve already written similar content before, linking these posts will make your authority about the subject matter stronger. Aside from that, linking related posts will also help improve your ranking in Google and decrease your bounce rate (the number of visitors who opt out from your website after viewing just one page).
6. Regularly add fresh content on your website.
This will give Google an idea that your website is “alive and kicking.” If your website is active, web crawlers will crawl often and if not, it will seldom visit your website and ultimately affect your ranking on search engines.
7. Download the Yoast SEO plugin.
When I first knew about SEO, it seemed like a daunting task for me but thanks to the Yoast SEO plugin, creating SEO-friendly content is a lot easier.
· After choosing a focus keyword, the plugin will check if they keyword is strategically located (the title of your content, the content heading, the page URL, the body, and the meta-description).
· It will help you develop a meta description (a 160 character summary of your content).
· It will calculate your Flesch reading ease score (indicates how easy or difficult it is to read your sentences).
· It will check if you placed links and images on your content.
· It will calculate the number of words and will help determine how often you should use the keyword within the content.
· It will also check if you have other content on your website are using the same keyword, thus keeping you from becoming your own competitor.
If your content is SEO-friendly, the plugin will indicate green bullets on the content analysis box. If the bullet is yellow, you may have to tweak it a little to improve it. But if the bullet is red, you definitely have to do major changes to make it green.
The plugin is available to all WordPress users. If you’re not a WordPress user, don’t fret. You can use their Content Analysis Tool.
Finally, always remember that the quality of your content will increase your likelihood of gaining a great ranking in Google and social media shares on Facebook and other social media platforms.
So keep your SEO-friendly content hot, fresh, and relevant, just like pancakes!
