How to write SEO friendly content

As the search engines algorithms that shape the world of search engine optimisation (SEO) change, so to do the tactics used to appease them. With big players like Google focusing more creating an algorithm that identifies the objective quality of webpage content, it has never been more important to make sure your writing is top notch.

Writing is something anyone can do; writing quality content for the purposes of SEO is something entirely different. It’s not as simple as making sure your grammar and spelling is correct as it requires you to use SEO principles throughout.

Let’s take a look at how to write SEO friendly content.

Optimise your article length

Longer articles are always more engaging than shorter ones and search engines like Google agree, giving higher rankings to content they consider being “in-depth”.  For Google, an article needs to be at least 300 words or more to gain its attention, but the optimal word count is considered between 500 to 2000 words on a single webpage.

Keep your information concise and authoritative

While article length is important, 2000 words of meaningless conjecture isn’t going to be engaging or very authoritative. It’s essential that you stay on topic and deliver accurate information in an authoritative way.

This means you actually need to know what you’re talking about and be able to express a concrete opinion. Articles that use too much of a passive voice (words like maybe, can, could) are not considered to be authoritative and are won’t be ranked as highly as articles that make a statement.

Format, format, format!

The formatting of your writing is essential to keeping readers engaged and helping them to find the answers they want without hassle. A big block of text, no matter how long or authoritative it is, isn’t going to be fun for anyone to read.

Therefore it’s important that you break up your writing into logical paragraphs and under relevant subheadings. Each new thought should be a new paragraph and each new paragraph should fall under the right subheading.

This is important because internet users will most likely skim your content rather than read it from start to finish. Therefore you should make it easier for people to skim the article by breaking everything up and using plenty of bullet points, tables and numbered lists.

Use images

When publishing your content, it’s always a good idea to include relevant images that help to further break up the monotony of plain text. Images should be visually interesting and captioned with something relevant to both the image and the subject matter of the content.