Content plays a very important role in deciding your site’s rank in the SERPs. All types of content on your website – be it a blog post, description or any other type of miscellaneous text – have to be properly optimized so that they can contribute to your SERP ranking.
In this post, we are going to be looking at 5 such tips that you can incorporate in your content writing process.
Let’s begin.
5 SEO-Friendly Tips to Increase Your SERP Ranking
1. Adjust Keywords Properly
Keywords are essential for SEO content. Whenever you want to write some content for SEO purposes, be it a blog post, article, or even a description, you have to make sure that you add relevant keywords to it in the proper density.
Oftentimes, writers do fine to choose proper and relevant keywords. However, they can go overboard with the usage, which can make their content an absolute pain to read.
Adjusting the focus keyword too many times, and littering the content with secondary keywords and LSI’s can make the whole text look and sound forced. Your readers will get the impression (quite rightly) that the content is written not for their ease and edification, but just for stuffing many keywords as possible.
This can be bad for your readership. If you want to attract new readers to your blog while retaining and maintaining a steady stream of existing ones, you should write your content in such a way that the audience feels addressed and acknowledged.
While this is the more…sentimental side of things, there are some technical SEO-related consequences that you will have to face should you add too many keywords in your content.
Google – or any other search engine, for that matter – will recognize an unusual and over-usage of keywords as keyword stuffing. Sites that are caught doing ‘keyword stuffing’ can get their SERP rank reduced. They could, as a result of repeated offenses, also face more severe consequences such as site de-indexing.
2. Add Headings, Sub-Headings, and Bullets
When writing for SEO, you have to make sure that you keep your content reader-friendly.
In terms of SEO, an ideal piece of content would be one that is easy to navigate and read due to having many headings, sub-headings, and sub-sections. (There are other things that would be required to make some content ideal, but this is one of the main requisites.)
When you start your content off, you should write the title in an H1 heading style. Then, you should move on to organizing the rest of the content in general sections using the H2 heading style. These types of sections usually include the introduction, main body, and conclusion.
Thereafter, you should move down and divide the H2 sections into further parts using the H3 heading style. If you feel like you’ve added enough headings, you can use bullets.
This sort of arrangement makes it easy for your reader to navigate through the content. They will be able to skip to the parts they need to read, and they will be able to get a quick idea about the topics that are featured and discussed in the post/article.
There is one very important point that you should always keep in mind when writing content for SEO. You have to make your reader happy.
If your reader is happy after going through your content, they will follow your blog, share it and make recurring trips to it. All of this will have a positive effect on your website’s SERP rank.
3. Check Your Completed Draft for Plagiarism
Plagiarizing content has severe consequences. It can ruin your reputation as a writer, and it can get your site in serious trouble with the search engine.
Sites that are caught plagiarizing content can get penalized by the search engine. While some light plagiarism perpetrated by a one-timer may only result in a rank reduction, repeated offenses can end up in site indexing.
To avoid these sorts of situations, you should always take care to check your completed work for plagiarism.
You should take care to use a reliable plagiarism checker when looking for duplication in your content. Some checkers available online have a very poor algorithm, and they don’t spot obvious chunks of copied text. Some checkers, on the other hand, can go the other way and start picking single words and two-word phrases as ‘plagiarism’.
4. Remove Duplication Where Found
Checking for duplication alone isn’t enough when you want to write SEO-optimized content. You also have to remove it before finalizing your draft.
There are different ways in which you can remove plagiarized bits of text from your writing. You can either delete them entirely, or you can reword them to make them unique.
In the latter option, there are further two more options that you can try. You can either reword the content manually viz. yourself, or you can use a paraphrase tool instead.
As far as manual rewording goes, it is good for small pieces of text, or maybe even a short blog post.
On the other hand, if you want to reword a lot of material at once, using a paraphrasing tool is more feasible since it’s quicker.
5. Don’t Forget Visuals
Adding visuals in your content is very important.
There are two main ways in which adding visuals can be helpful for your site’s rank.
Firstly, it can be very good for your content’s readability. Having some useful graphics and images inserted in between your text can look a whole lot nicer than the humdrum wall of text.
If your content is enjoyable to read, your readers will share it, and they will make recurring trips to your site/blog. This will eventually mean that your readership will increase, and your site traffic will start climbing. This will help your website get a better rank in the SERPs.
Secondly, adding images relevant to your text can be beneficial since they can increase the chances of your website showing up if someone searches for an image related to it. People use reverse searches quite a bit nowadays.
And yes. You should not forget to add alt texts to your images. Alt texts can make it easier for the site crawlers to determine what the image is about.
Conclusion
While there are a lot of other tips and steps that you should focus on when writing your content, you should focus on these five points in particular.
Adding proper keywords, organizing your content in headings and sub-headings
Ameer Hamza is a passionate Content writer, Blogger and SEO Expert. Being devoted to making a difference through his publications, he chose to blog as a career during his academic years. Compiling his knowledge from Information Technology, he is pursuing to present technological solutions through his writings.
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