5 Intelligent Ways to Write SEO Friendly Content To Gain Website Traffic

• Updated on: 2019-05-18
• Read original article here

“Sam, please advise me… how do I write a good SEO friendly content?” a frustrated friend once asked me.

I hope he’s reading this post right now as I am going to spend a good amount of time explaining what Search Engine Optimization is and how to properly format your blog posts for SEO through a strategy called SEO Optimization. That said. In this post, I will make sure to cover some of the most important SEO elements from On-Page SEO to Off-Page SEO, all of which will help you do a proper SEO content marketing for your brand or those of your clients. Since I’ve been in the blogging business for nearly a decade ago, I get asked so many questions about SEO and how to infuse it into a company’s overall business strategy. Truth is there are many ways to go about doing and writing proper SEO friendly articles for your blog or as a guest post for other blogs on the internet. You just have to search well for SEO friendly content guidelines on Google or on YouTube. Believe me, there are a lot of good resources on the subject ofSEO Friendly Content at your disposal. And thankfully, this blog post is one of such. Somewhere in this article, I will do well to give you some heads up by sharing with you some SEO friendly content checker tools and SEO friendly content sample ideas to get you started on your journey as an SEO-friendly Content Beast. But right now, let’s talk about SEO, what it is, and how to deploy it.

These are the kinds of content that are well optimized for search or organic website traffic.

They are the kinds of content that pass for good, quality, and evergreen content.

Whatever you do, always remember that Content is King and that Value is the King Maker.

So, in other words, your content has to be VALUE-filled, that is, useful and helpful to the needs of your target audience.

write SEO friendly Blog Posts 5 simple techniques to help you write SEO friendly Blog Posts Actually, there are a plethora of SEO techniques out there, but these ones will do magic. “First: Focus on searcher intent. This should underpin all of your activities—research, creation and distribution. What is the searcher really trying to achieve and how is your content helping them reach this goal?” Believe me, one of the common blogging mistakes, I have often seen new bloggers make is jumping into writing a piece without researching the quality and usefulness of the subject in relation to their target audience. Yes, it’s good and definitely applaudable to write new blog posts on your blog, but I am sorry to break the news to you, nobody will read your blog (even me) if your blog posts are not useful or helpful in solving their pained-points. Therefore, it is paramount that you take ample time to research the quality and searchability of your keywords before injecting and infusing them into your blog posts. Asides from the fact that I share SEO content writing tips on this blog, all of my blog posts are a direct testament of my SEO knowledge and application just as you would soon see from the images I included in the body of this content. But first, let’s go over the meaning of keyword research and how to do it.“Today it’s not about ‘get the traffic’ — it’s about ‘get the targeted and relevant traffic.” – Adam Audette, Chief Knowledge Officer, RKGClick To Tweet So, what is Keyword Research? Keyword research is the process by which you research popular search terms people type into search engines like Google, and include them strategically in your content so that your content appears higher on a search engine results page (SERP). While doing keyword research it is important that you focus on long tail keywords, instead of short tail keyword phrases. You might ask, “But Sam, why should I focus on long tail keyword phrase and not short tail keyword phrase?” Well, the reason is simple. Most short tail keywords are already occupied by the big names in the blogging industry or by top-placed individuals. Are you confused about what I meant by short tail or long tail keyword? I will explain it in a bit…“Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first.” – Wendy PiersallClick To Tweet SEOPressor’s definition of the two phenomena is quite succinct and straightforward. Short tail keywords are 3 words or less. Examples include: “athletic apparel,” “DVD player,” or “engagement ring.” Short tail keywords are also known as “head terms”. They may be the first thing you think of when you are deciding where to go to eat (“Chinese food,” “pizza delivery”), what to do (“dance clubs,” “roller coaster park”), or where to worship (“synagogue,” “Catholic church”). Long tail keywords however are a little different compared to short tail keywords. Long tail words are more than 3 words. They are definitely a lot more targeted and not as broad. You may not bring in as much search traffic from long tail keywords but the traffic you do bring in is the kind you are looking for. Examples of long tail keywords include: “summer women’s athletic apparel,” “super Blu Ray HD DVD combo player,” or “white diamond engagement ring.” Long tail keywords are obviously a lot more specific than short tail keywords; as a marketer this actually can work very much in your favor. But there are pros and cons to both types of keywords. And guys, there are various ways to do or carry out keyword research for yourself or for your company. Majorly, online marketing experts the world over make use of tools, whether free or paid tools, that makes the entire process of keyword research seamlessly easy and just as I promised, I will share some of them with you here in this post. But hey, learning about keyword research and all of the other things I will share with you in this single post will not automatically make the difference for you unless of course, you are willing to get your hands dirty by doing what you have to do to get the kind of results you are aiming to get. There are several tools you can use to research, discover, and document the best keyword phrases for your business. Below, I mentioned some of them. #1. Ubersuggest – This is a nifty-SEO tool created by the great Neil Patel himself. This tool does exactly what its name infers… it suggest well-performing keyword phrases that will explode your website traffic over 200% via Search Engine. The Ubersuggest SEO tool will show you what keywords your competitors are already ranking for and will show you just how you can outrank them doing something different to what they did or are doing. While preparing this blog posts, of course, I searched for its performance potential and stumbled on some really interesting metrics that I’m going to show you in a bit.

Read this: 7 Ways to Grow a Successful blog in Nigeria Without Losing Your Mind!

#3. Google Trend – Google Trend is another powerful free SEO tool that will make your blogging life easy.

I have not used it much in the past, but most SEO experts always advice to include it in our SEO Optimization strategy.

So, I did a quick search for “SEO Optimization”… see what I got below:

So you can see what people are interested in overtime, which regions they are that are interested in the topic, and exactly what they are searching for… That way, you can develop content that will beat the results that are currently being displayed.

#4. Answer the Public – This is one other tool I have come to love, and as the name infers, it helps you find questions, prepositions, comparisons, alphabetical, and related searches you can answer in a blog post.

I really love the GIF, especially the expression of the man.

You know he really wants you to type in that keyword so that he could get to work immediately. You know what am saying!

But before, I go about showing you my result, let me introduce you guys to Joshua Hardwick, the head of content @ Ahrefs (or, in plain English, he’s the guy responsible for ensuring that every published blog post on Ahrefs.com is EPIC).

So on February 20, 2019, Joshua published a powerful post on the 10 Free Keyword Research Tools (That  CRUSH Google Keyword Planner). I think you should check that post for a more complete free SEO tools, particularly for a thorough explanation of how to gain website traffic using Answer the Public SEO tool.

So, speaking of results, below are the pictorial response the Answer the Public keyword research tool gave me when I plugged in my keyword phrase…

#5. Google AutuSuggest – Google is perhaps the biggest and the most used search engine tool on the internet today.

This, therefore, mean that using them for your SEO Optimization techniques should be the first action call for you as a blogger, whether a beginner blogger or a household name blogger.

So just like I’ve done with the previous tools, I also search for the keyword we are trying to rank for on Google’s search bar and below are the results I got…

I could easily pick all these other keyword variations and sprinkle them inside my content, which is exactly what I did with this post you are reading.

If you are new to SEO Optimization, you should take notice of the “People also ask” section which highlights what people are also searching for.

The King of search knows everything, including a searchers intent, and hence, it shows him or her other related questions people are asking and want to know the answer to.

As a wise and sharp blogger, you should take note of this section very well. What’s even more interesting is when you toggle the button, google loads up more questions for you like the example below:

While these SEO tools are great starters to writing SEO Optimized content, you shouldn’t spend all your time on them.

You should instead spend most of your time on writing and developing high-quality your audience wants to consume.

Focus on that (and get it right) and you’ll see how much easier it is to get high-quality backlinks from top-tier sources whilst you rank on Google SERPs.

Knowing how to do keyword research is not enough, what really matters is knowing how to deploy those keywords into the right place on your website. Whether it is on your homepage, your standalone pages such as “About” page, or “Start Here” page, or even in your blog posts. Just be sure you strategically insert these keywords on your website. A little while ago, Jennifer Yesbeck published a post for Blog.Alexa.com titled “The Essential Keyword Optimization Cheat Sheet for Better SEO” The primary keyword is in the page title. The important keyword phrase is near the beginning of the page title. The most important keyword term is in at least one subheading. The primary keyword is in the first paragraph of the body copy. Content is between 300 and 10,000 words. The primary keyword density is about 2%. The primary keyword is near the end of the page. Each secondary keyword is used at least one time. The content uses semantic search phrases that reinforce your topic and primary keyword. The primary keyword is in the permalink. The permalink is under 128 characters. The primary keyword is in the meta title. The primary keyword is near the beginning of the meta title. The meta title is unique and not a duplicate of other meta titles on your site. The meta title is 66 characters or less. There is only one meta title tag assigned to the page. The primary keyword is in the SEO meta description. The primary keyword is near the beginning of the meta description. The meta description is 320 characters or less. A least one image is on the page. The primary keyword is in an image alt tag on the page. The primary keyword is in an image file name used on the page. There are internal links to the page from pages on your site that are relevant to your topic and primary keyword. Internal links lead from the page to other pages on your site using the linked page’s target keyword. There are outbound links on the page. Jennifer is Marketing Manager at Alexa. With a knack for syntax and passion for building connections, she drives daily content strategy to bring you the latest and greatest happenings within Alexa and the wide world of web analytics and marketing.Use this checklist to make sure you cover all your keyword optimization bases.Click To Tweet In case you are wondering how to analyze if you have done everything from the above list or not, you can make use of these two nifty-tools I use a lot here on my blog: Yoast SEO & Squirrly SEO. The Squirrly SEO was first recommended by SEO Lord, Neil Patel a long time ago, and I thought if Neil can be using this beginner-directed SEO plugin, then who am I not to. That was my first experience with Squirrly SEO and I haven’t looked back since then. It has helped me tackle different personal and business SEO projects. All I have to do is insert my keyword in its search bar, then it starts to analyze what I have done right or done wrong, and I can easily go back to my content to correct what needs to be corrected. Yes, simple as reading A B C… ???? But let me do a quick walk-through on how to use Squirrly SEO to supercharge your content and be able to gain website traffic to every of your blog posts. Is that a good thing to do? As you can see from the image above, all I had to do was to plug in my keyword into the Squirrly SEO search bar right inside my WordPress Visual Editor and viola, it suggested other keyword phrases I could consider sprinkling into the body of my content to make it more search engine friendly. After which, I pressed the blue button from the above picture, Squirrly SEO will then scan and analyze my content to see if it’s SEO friendly or not. If it is, it will suggest other strategies you could deploy to make it even much better than it currently is. If not, it walks you through all of the things you should do to make your content score high on an SEO standpoint. So speaking of my content, it’s currently looking good and you can see that from the image below. Do you see how I score green on almost all of its analysis? That’s what you should aim for when next you are planning to write an SEO friendly article. As you can see, it’s suggesting other tweaks I should look into to further have a better SEO score. Now, guys, that’s how to use Squirrly SEO to supercharge your content in order to gain website traffic on a fleek. And just like Yoast SEO, Squirrly SEO affords you the opportunity to edit your Meta Data Snippet by adding your content title, the description of your content, and the keywords people you want to rank for. Also, like Yoast SEO, it shows you how your page will appear on Search Engines like Google, Bing, and many others. The truth is the fact that if your content is written to stand the test of time, Google will have no hard time displaying it on the first page. “Sadly, much of the content being published is simply not worth linking to. 75% of it is getting zero inbound links. So forget the ‘more is better’ approach to content if you want links. Go with quality instead. Your content will generate links only if it is truly exceptional—’remarkable,’ as Seth Godin would say.” Read this: 5 Reasons Why You Should Power Your Website With WordPress

As a blogger, one of the things you should put to the heart is learning and working on structuring your content, whether blog content or any kind of content you are creating. The reason is simple, it makes it very easy for people to read your blog. Remember those days in school when your English teacher will tell you that for every piece of writing; there is the beginning, the middle, and the end. So simply put, the introduction is there to help set the stage and the first scene for your blog readers. The middle, if detailed, should then be broken down into sub-headings, as I did with this post. For the sake of an easy reading and learning experience, I always make sure to use sub-headings to express my important points. And your end, which is also your conclusion should always have some sort of call to action or CTA, that is, a direction for what your blog readers should do next, such as “Please do share this post with your friends” or “If you find this post helpful, please do leave me a comment to let me know” or “Subscribe to our newsletter to be the first to be notified of new post”. I mean the list of actionable CTAs are actually endless. While I was doing the research of this section, I stumbled on a post written by Victoria for BlogAmbitious.com on How to Write and Structure a Blog Post Your Readers and Google Will Love. What incited me the most about her article was how she broke down content structuring into a definitive image. Check it below: I believe the image above has well-captured everything you need to know about content structuring and how to easily infuse into your SEO copywriting strategy. By the way, if you would love to learn how to write SEO friendly posts, these title generator ideas as created by Prince will walk you through the entire process.“Good SEO is paying attention to all the details that most bloggers ignore.” — Ryan Biddulph, BloggingFromParadise.comClick To Tweet Believe me, using headlines and sub-headers has several SEO benefits. Asides the fact that headers are a great way to tell Google to push traffic to your blog, they are also a great way to provide structures for your blog content. Your headline and sub-headers help Google to easily read, interpret and understand what your blog is about. It also helps your blog readers to easily scan through your blog posts.

If you have just started your blog and are looking to get eyeballs to your website, then creating shareable content should be your first call of action.

Did I hear you ask, “But Sam, how do I create shareable content for my blog?’

Well, it’s quite simple.

And based on a considerable amount of research, I’ve come to find out that the majority of online users and surfers skim and scan blog posts.

In a nutshell, if you are going to write a blog post that scores high on social shares (And social shares or social proof have recently become one of SEO ranking factors), you’d then do well to infuse all of the above points into your next blog post.

A Visual FAQ to SEO is a great infographic from Matt at Datadial.net covering many of the different aspects of Search Engine Optimization for your web pages.

Actually, Buzzsumo is one of my all-time favorite blogging tools and I like to recommend all the time, especially to folks having a hard time to come up with content ideas for their blog.

Just as you might have seen from the above screenshot, all I ever had to do was simply to visit some of the best-performing blog posts n the list, read them, and get inspired by them to write my own unique, authentic and shareable blog content.

Really, you don’t have any excuse for saying, “oh! I have a writer’s block”.

#3. Hemmingway App -This one of the best tools I always recommend to beginner writers.

If you would really love to write fantastic and sharable blog articles, then you should consider using the Hemingway app to supercharge your writing tasks.

What this tool does is simple.

It helps you analyze your content to highlight instances of passive voice.

And it also helps to highlight some of your sentences which may be too difficult to read.

The idea is to 1) help you construct great content, and 2) score high on SEO as readabilities sometimes equal searchability.

#4. Grammarly – One of the tools that help in brushing up my English language mastery is Grammarly.

It is one of those tools that do exactly what they say they can do.

I don’t joke with this nifty-tool and like, Buzzsumo, I always recommend it to beginner bloggers who are just starting out the online business journey.

So you say “Sam, but I am not so sure about the quality of my writing… I made mistakes in my spellings here and there…”

Well, the Grammarly tool is a perfect correction tool that assists you in writing the perfect SEO friendly article.

Now, look at the image above…

That’s a demo content uploaded by Grammarly, and the red-highlighted words or phrases are signs that your content needs some correction.

I hate to admit this but I scored really badly with this article, but all thanks to Grammarly, I was able to narrow down from 100+ writing errors to a perfectly worded content.

Now, isn’t that huge and lovely?

#5. Keyword Density Checker – What this tool does is simple, it simply goes in to scan your texts or URL address to find out how many times you have cited each keyword you aim to rank for. And if you are like me, you like to write very long articles, this tool might just be a lifesaver in making sure that your blog content is not overly saturated with keywords.

#6. Read-Able – Read-Able is another wonderful tool that I think every online content creators and curators should check out.

You just simply need to either copy-paste your content in the “Test by Direct Input” area or by typing in your blog’s URL into the “Test by URL” search bar.

Read-Able will then scan through your blog if you provided them with your site’s URL and give you a thorough analysis of your blog content to help gauge how easy it is for people to understand the content you’re pushing out there.

So, I typed in a URL of one of my blog content – How to Create Unique Blog Content – and it quickly analyzed and showed me the results of how the page score on readability, which is a HUGE aspect of SEO friendly article.

And it will also give you your text statistics and as you can see from the image above, the content in question is cornerstone content.

But one thing that you should also take note of, that is important, from the first image is when Read-Able said my content “Has an average grade level of about 6. It should be understood by 11 to 12-year-olds.

In other words, your content should be easily understood by an average-internet-Joe.

#7. SEO Optimization – This On-Page optimization tool helps you analyze your website’s data, from texts to images, and other content forms and gives you heads up on how best to improve the data just so you are able to rank your content on Google’s first page.

So after typing in my website’s URL and keyword phrases, the tool goes int to fetch out the results below.

Now, this gives you a thorough overview of how your page currently looks like, and it informs your decision on how to better use this data to optimize your page in order to rank higher on Google’s SERPs.

#8. SEO Rambler – Does it keep you up at night to know that your competitors are ranking well on Google and you are not?

Are you currently ranked on the first page, but you want to move to the TOP 3 position?

Are you wondering how optimized your blog page is for a particular keyword?

Do you want to hack into the data pf your competition to see how your SEO optimization compares to theirs?

If you answered ‘Yes’ to all of the questions above, then this SEO Rambler tool might just be an SEO-lifesaver for you.

This tool helps you to examine where you currently stand as far as SEO is concerned and informs you on how best to tweak your content to score high on Search Engine Ranking Pages.

Here are some of the things it helps you analyze:

So, if you really want to rank on search engines and gain website traffic, be sure to give this tool a try.

#9. Wordgraph – This is another powerful and very useful SEO tool that will explode your website traffic.

All you have to do is type in your best keyword, your page URL, and your location, and this tool will go into analyze and show you the results of pages that are currently ranking for that particular keyword.

#10. SEORCH – Like SEO Optimization tool, SEORCH does a good job at helping you do proper On-Page SEO optimization.

This tool helps you check how good a webpage is optimized for SEO.

What it does is simple, it helps to monitor your keywords and provides you thorough ranking strategies.

I think you should give it a go as well, especially if you want to gain a lot of search traffic.