SEO-Optimized Content: A Step-by-Step Guide to Rank High On SERPs
For making your website rank high on the SERPs, there is a number of different SEO-related factors that you have to work on. For one, you have to make sure that your metadata is properly in place. You also...
For making your website rank high on the SERPs, there is a number of different SEO-related factors that you have to work on. For one, you have to make sure that your metadata is properly in place. You also have to make sure that your website is quick to load and easy to navigate.
However, of these various types of factors, one of the most important ones is creating SEO-optimized content.
The presence of SEO-optimized content on your website can contribute largely to its rank on the SERPs. A website that has content with the proper keywords and formatting as well as the right readability elements will rank way higher than a website that has no content published on it at all.
If you’re finding it hard to come up with awesome SEO content for your website, don’t worry. In this post, that is what we’re going to be looking at.
A Step-by-Step Guide for Creating SEO-Optimized Content
Without further ado, let’s start off with the steps that you can take to make your content optimized for SEO.
1. Conduct Proper Keyword Research
The first thing that you have to do when it comes to creating SEO-optimized content is to do proper keyword research.
The thing that actually makes your content potent for SEO is keyword usage. If there aren’t any keywords in your content, it won’t really serve a major purpose with regard to your site’s SEO. So, prior to embarking on the content creation phase, you first have to make sure that you have the right keyword strategy in place.
To begin with, you have to select some suitable keywords related to your niche. In order to do this, you can use tools such as Ahrefs and SEMrush.
By using these types of tools, you can find out useful suggestions for keywords that you can include in your SEO strategy. You can also get different types of information about individual keywords such as their search volume, click-through rate and ranking difficulty etc.
2. Write Your Content with Proper Organization
Once you are done with the keyword research, you can move on to writing the content itself.
During the writing phase, you have to keep one important thing in mind. Whatever you do, don’t make your content difficult for your audience to read.
One of the biggest factors that can lead to a lack of readability is…the lack of organization. If your content is jumbled up together in one piece without any sort of headings and bullets, it can be very difficult for your readers to go through it.
You have to add a proper number of headings, sub-headings and bullets in your content so that it does not appear as a giant wall of text. And in order to do this, you have to make sure that you pick a good word processing software.
In a good word processing software, such as MS Word and Google Docs, there will be plenty of styling and formatting options that you can use for organizing and arranging your content properly.
3. Keep Your Sentences Readable
This is yet another thing that you should keep in mind when writing SEO content.
In the above heading, we just mentioned that you have to keep your content readable at all times. Other than the organization of your content, another aspect that can play a role here is the complexity of your sentences.
When you want to write a piece of content, especially for SEO purposes, you should keep the sentences short and you should also try to keep your vocabulary simple and basic. Not repeating words over and over again is also a good idea, since this can also wreck the reading experience.
Using a tool that can help you by paraphrasing can be a great way to deal with these types of issues. In other words, if you find that the words used in your content are too difficult or if you find that your sentences are repetitive, you can use a paraphrasing tool to fix them.
Paraphrasing tools essentially change the given content by replacing some (or most) of the included words with their synonyms and altering the sentence arrangement.
4. Find Plagiarism in Your Content
Before elaborating on this part, there is something that we should clear up first.
In this post, we’re basically looking at a step-by-step guide to creating SEO-friendly content. However, when it comes to creating such content, there are a lot of steps that you have to do after you’re done writing it. Checking plagiarism is one such step.
Plagiarism can be very damaging to the SEO-friendliness of a piece of content, and you have to avoid it at all costs. To make sure that your content is unique, you can use a plagiarism checker.
Plagiarism-checking tools essentially scan the given content against the internet to see if there is any match between it and previously published sources. If there are any, the tool highlights them. A lot of tools also provide the link to the source from where the content is found to be copied.
5. Make Content Unique with an Article Rewriter
Finding plagiarism in your content is one thing, and taking care of it is another.
As far as plagiarism checkers go, they can only help you spot the duplicated parts in your text. They don’t do anything else.
Hence, if you happen to check your content for plagiarism and the results show that a specific portion is copied from a source, you have to take the necessary to make it (the copied portion) unique.
Using a rewriter tool is a great way to do this.
6. Find and Remove Grammatical/Spelling Errors
Finding and removing grammatical/spelling errors is actually one of the most vital and important steps that you have to take when creating SEO-friendly content. However, the reason that we are mentioning it at the end is that checking the grammar/spelling after doing all the other steps (such as removing plagiarism and adjusting readability) will help to make sure that no errors slip by.
In other words, if you were to check the grammar and spelling beforehand, and then make some changes to the content, you could accidentally make some errors that could go undetected.
To find and remove grammatical and spelling errors from your content, you can take the help of grammar-checking tools. There are a lot of such tools available online, and a lot of them are free to use as well. The method of use on most grammar checkers is pretty much the same. You have to enter your content, run the check and then correct each error by clicking on it and selecting the right suggestion.
Conclusion
Truth be told, there is a lot more to creating SEO-optimized content than what we’ve mentioned in this post. Adding links, images, alt texts etc., are all important aspects that we did not discuss here.
Nevertheless, the points that we did mention are some basic and elementary ones. If you don’t know anything about optimizing content for SEO, you can start with the steps above. Once you’re comfortable and acquainted with them, you can move on to the more advanced measures as well.