10 Tips for Optimizing Website SEO Content for Better Rankings - AdMarketing Titan

Content doesn’t have to be just informational, it has to be readable.

Google and other search engines have algorithms that measure the post's readability; if it fails the test, other readers might never find the blog post.

Writing blogs requires understanding how to present information in front of the audience that is digestible and informational so that they come again for more.

Moreover, if the content is easily understandable, they are more likely to share the content with others. Successful SEO writing includes both

• Writing for the algorithm.
• Writing for audience.

This post provides tips on how to structure the content to be SEO-friendly and readable.

Use of Keywords in Blog Title

Both search engines and the readers greatly emphasize the blog title.

For search engines, blog titles act as a mild ranking signal, blog title often defines the impressions-to-click ratio.

For the user, it acts as a filter to as whether the blog title is convincing enough to click on the link to jump to the website from the search results page.

The blog title is the first thing that the readers see. Therefore, it’s important to optimize the title enough so as to it say what the blog post is about without being clickbait-y.

Google stops displaying the title on the search results page after 60 characters.

Take the help of ChatGPT to generate blog titles and then pick the best possible headline.

 

Keywords in URL structure

Here’s something to do outside of the actual content on the page.

Optimizing the URL of the page.

To optimize the URL structure, consider keeping the article permalink short and the keyword included.

There is no fixed rule for URL structure but make the URL something that a user understands as well as the search engines.

For example, for a blog post explaining the top 10 chocolate recipes, the URL for an example site can be

https://www.examplesite.com/top-10-chocolate-recipes/

It helps the search engine’s crawler understand the subject of the page.

 

Add images, and videos to your blog

All text and no images make the reader dull.

Great blog posts, especially those that rank on the results page have images and videos that further explain the topic.

Images and other forms of content act as a retention magnet for the user in a sea of texts.

A reader is more likely to pick up information from an image or video rather than text.

Keep in mind to only add copyright-free pictures. Otherwise, your website can be penalized, thus affecting the rankings.

If you want to use stock images, there are great websites such as Pexels and Pixabay that not only offer images but also videos.

For the case of using videos, instead of using WordPress as a video serving platform, consider video hosting sites like YouTube and Vimeo.

 

Use alt text for images and other multimedia

Search engines cannot read images as humans do.

Therefore, they need additional information that would help them categorize the image and help them add context to the blog post while crawling.

Here, alternative text (alt text) becomes important for the same reason.

According to Microsoft, alt text is “descriptive text which conveys the meaning and context of a visual item in a digital setting such as an app or web page.”

Consider adding a related keyword that would describe the image.

 

Featured snippets

Although, AI Overviews are slowly trying to take the space of featured snippets, but you should always optimize for the featured snippets.

There will be time before Google starts to permanently start placing AI overviews in place of featured snippets.

Moreover, there is no extra cost just to answer questions in an optimized manner for the search to pick up for search results.

The upside is your website has the chance to be placed on the top of even the number one ranked website for that phrase or keyword.

To better optimize for featured snippets, it’s important to answer questions directly through the blog posts.

 

Use Internal Linking

Internal linking is one of the best ways to get the traffic distributed to all the pages in a website.

Once enough content is on the website, active steps should be taken to link the content from one page to another.

For people using WordPress, it’s easy to search your blog posts inside the post editor. Just select the text you want to link and click on the link button. A text popup should appear below the highlighted word. Then start typing to search the want-to-link post to put the link it.

The internal link also helps search engines understand the context of the post regarding the rest of the site.

Therefore, utilize the power of internal linking to give a boost to SEO strategy.

 

Make the content easier to read

At the end of the day, the content is created for the user, not the search engines.

Therefore, the content should be drafted in such a way that the user’s attention towards the blog post doesn’t fall off and can seamlessly jump from one sub-topic to another.

Readability is an important factor that is to be considered for a better user experience.

Articles that have high readability scores tend to outrank the ones that are not.

Most users usually scan the content to understand if the content is worth reading. Therefore, as content creators, it’s important to convince the reader subconsciously that the post is worth reading.

One of the primary ways to improve the readability of a post is to use shorter, simple sentences whenever possible.

Use bullet points, small paragraphs, and headings to divide a bigger topic into smaller digestible chunks.

Use online grammar checkers tools like Grammerly and Hummingbird to correct the writing mistakes faster.

 

Add relevant tags and categories to differentiate

One of the beginners’ mistakes while making content for a website is either not having separate categories for the blog posts or using them incorrectly.

Categories and tags are useful for separating the content and making it easier not only for the readers but also for the search engines to differentiate the content topics.

The categories act as a content page for the website being a book.

For more information, there is a wonderful blog post by WPBeginner on using categories and tags on a website.

 

Optimizing for mobile content

The world is moving to a mobile-first online content-serving platform.

People on average spend more time on the mobile rather than on the desktop.

Therefore it is important to every website owner to optimize the website and its elements to satisfy the people visiting through the smaller device.

Google employs a mobile-first indexing practice, meaning that the algorithm puts the preference on making sure that the website has a mobile-friendly design.

Use the free tool PageSpeed Insights by Google to examine how your website fares in the mobile experience and make necessary changes.

 

Writing comprehensive content

Whenever you search anything on Google, 9 out of 10 times you would notice that the top 10 results on Google have long-form content in them.

This means Google prefers long-form content in most of cases and therefore you should too.

You can gather LSI keywords that are closely related to the main keyword and then add them in the blog post to write a longer and more comprehensive post.

Use the People Also Ask section in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) section to get more ideas to expand the topic related to the main topic and add more depth to the blog post.

Plus Tip: When you start writing a blog post, search for the topic and then open the first 10 blog posts ranking on Google. Then, use an online word counting tool and calculate the average number of words written. Then write the content closer to that number.

 

In conclusion, to rank first in the search results for a long time, you need not only to serve the target audience but also to convince the search engines that the content is worthy of ranking on the results page.

Competition is growing and it’s important to keep improving the quality of the content and optimize for what the audience wants to see.