I am sure I, you and all my blogger friends put a lot of efforts in writing unique articles.
But with passing time traffic for that particular article gets lessen.
One of the great tricks to get traffic for your oldest posts is to make them search engine friendly.
The search engine can only help you to increase the lost traffic for an older post.
Here I want to share some excellent tips for Writing SEO-Friendly Content that give you better ranking in a search engine.
For a search engine, each blog post is a web page. You should always optimize your post with certain SEO guidelines to get better search engine ranking.
I suggest you to install Yoast SEO plugin to follow SEO guidelines without missing any.
There are many things you must care while writing an article and I am discussing these in this post.
Whenever I write a new article for my blog, I have certain rules written in my notebook to write SEO optimized articles. I follow the rules for writing SEO-friendly content.
But here I have compiled all the ideas in a post and thought to benefit you as much as I can. This way my readers (you) will get SEO content writing tips as well.
In this post I am not covering any keyword research, it is itself a broad topic and I will do so in future.
Steps for write SEO optimized articles with Yoast SEO plugin:
For WordPress two most recommended plugins to write SEO optimized articles are below:
All in one SEO
Yoast SEO
To download Yoast SEO Premium Plugin click here
Here I am going to describe the steps for Yoast Plugin.
1-Post title and Meta title
I will tell you the difference between Post title and Post Meta title first.
Post title: What reader will see?
Post Meta title: What search engine watch and show it in the search result.
In Yoast, if you haven’t put any SEO title i.e. Meta title then by default your post title is considered as Meta title You should always have your keywords in Post title and Meta title. For better understanding read my post blog search engine optimization, increase traffic to your blog.
Note: Post title must not be too long i.e. less than 65 characters because after that Google doesn’t have space to display, consequently half of the title would not be displayed.
I will tell you the difference between Post title and Post Meta title first.
Post title: What reader will see?
Post Meta title: What search engine watch and show it in the search result.
In Yoast, if you haven’t put any SEO title i.e. Meta title then by default your post title is considered as Meta title You should always have your keywords in Post title and Meta title. For better understanding read my post blog search engine optimization, increase traffic to your blog.
Note: Post title must not be too long i.e. less than 65 characters because after that Google doesn’t have space to display, consequently half of the title would not be displayed.
2-Post Meta description
Yoast SEO plugin also has the block to add Meta description, and it plays very important role in search engine ranking. Meta description appears below your post title on a search engine.
For Meta description 156 characters are allowed and you must include your keywords within.
So create a description seductive enough for the user to click on it. The Yoast SEO plugin will give an error if you miss any step.
I am sure you must have understood the importance of Meta description now, so from now onwards make a habit of using it, do add Meta description to your previous published post
We all write a post to get more traffic so we should be writing SEO optimized articles for people and search engine both.
3-Image Alt Attribute
I ensure you search engine doesn’t have an algorithm to read images. You must be thinking then when anyone searches for images on Google, thousands of images appear in a minute.
This happens because they use the proper alt tag. Search engine recognizes images by text. To make search engine understand about what the images, you must use proper images names.
Most of the blogger upload images with a name like images232.png and these images never appear on a search engine. This is a blunder mistake.
For example, if you are an uploading screenshot of WordPress dashboard and you name the image “WordPress”, then it is not appropriate. Instead, if you name “WordPress-dashboard” to get it appear on a search engine.
If you are not interested in using any plugin, no problem, then manually you have to add ALT text to uploading images.
I suggest you to use your keywords in ALT text of at least one of the images.
4-Interlink and Anchor text
Writing new post keep the blog alive. But we should always link back to an older post by some writing technique. Doing this keeps your old post alive and also gets traffic.
When you interlinks to another post I suggest you to always use the anchor text title. See the below screenshot, you need to fill the title block with the important keyword of an older post.
You can also use a plugin called WordPress Insights to quickly interlink within the post.
5-Permalink and remove stop words
When we write a post title lots of stop words are present which is important for making the title meaningful.
You can find a comprehensive list of stop words here and here. For example, in the current post title: The Ultimate Tips to Writing SEO Friendly Content, default permalink would be the -ultimate-tips-to-writing-SEO-friendly-content.
“To” is stop words in the permalink above. But to eliminate the stop I changed the permalink to writing-SEO-friendly-content.
Tip: Change the permalink before it is published.
6-H1, H2, H3 Headings
To create attractive post we must use headings, without reading the complete post this lets the users know what the post is. This is also an important aspect of SEO, use the headings properly.
By default, all modern theme post title uses H1 tags and only one H1 tag should be present on any post. So now you have to use H2 and H3 tags for rest of the post.
It is very important to use proper heading tags for writing SEO-friendly content, specifically for a long post.
To make you understand how to use headings in better way I have collected links< Link1>
As per many blogging experts, it is considered good to use your keywords in Heading H1, H2, and H3 tags.
Finally, you have got an SEO friendly website.
Suggestion: Always use SEO optimized WordPress themes to get better results.
What’re your tips for writing SEO-friendly content?
When I was using Yoast SEO plugin, I used above strategy writing for SEO and it worked well.
I would love to know your experience and tips that additionally add to my article. Please share it below.
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