SEO Writing: Rules for Optimized Content

Looking to master the art of SEO writing? Our comprehensive SEO writing article can help! Read along and learn how to write SEO-friendly content that drives traffic and engagement to your website.

Updated: 29 Jun, 23 by Susith Nonis 6 Min

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Knowing how to write is not enough to have an audience on the internet. Attracting Internet users to its site is an art subject to the rules of referencing search engines, Google in particular. Whatever your activity, if you want to acquire customers via the internet, having well-referenced content is important in your web strategy. To develop an SEO--Search Engine Optimization—smart acquisition strategy, you have to work on writing. Your content strategy must therefore consider the robots of the engines that index your pages. 

Every day, they scour the web and rank pages according to an ever-changing algorithm. There is no point in producing content if you forget natural referencing. You should write your articles in the following rules to be well referenced. The Grail is obviously to appear on the very first page of results! Even if there is another search engine, it is that of Google, which directs all the net referencing.

- I have always tried to recognize Google's algorithms like an addict. Here are 10 SEO web writing rules to be visible on the internet based on my intelligence:

The more your content will interest your readers, the more time they will spend on your page, and the better it will be rated by the engines. You need to understand what your readers want and meet their needs with content consistent with your business and site. The statistics of the most consulted pages of your site will tell you precisely which subjects are the most read and, therefore, the most relevant for your readers. If your site offers a search engine, the most searched words will also be valuable in choosing your next topic.

Guarantee of seriousness and in-depth subjects, a text of at least 600 words is preferred, the best being more than 2,000. But before pleasing the engines, the content must also interest readers. Needless to add, by "pulling the link", as journalists say, your readers will not like that.

No one likes to read chunky paragraphs, neither your visitors nor robots. For your reader and your SEO, your text must be readable, integrated and organized in paragraphs. So, opt for short, non-passive, non-repetitive sentences. Readability test tools also exist in CMS (such as SEO widgets in WordPress) to check that your texts are compliant. Feel free to bold words and create lists to make it easier to read on screen. Also, remember to start with the most interesting; visitors rarely scroll to the bottom of the pages, so you have to hook them from the start.

Be careful; Google easily spots this practice! Even if it's another site that belongs to you, the engine punishes what is called "duplicate content" in the business. This could drop your SEO dizzily. It is, therefore, a practice to be avoided, even for short texts.

  •  Crucial Point: If your site offers many similar pages, there are tools to report it to robots. You can, for example, define a canonical version of the page concerned, which will be explored in priority by the robots. The other URLs will be possible as duplicate URLs, not to be indexed by the robot. You can also combine them to make one.

Choose your keywords—one or two, maximum. You will have to place them in the titles, the first paragraph, the images' alternative texts, and the course in the text. Remember to adopt the vocabulary of Internet users you prefer and not your professional jargon. Finally, be careful, do not sprinkle your text with too many keywords—this is keyword stuffing; it will be poorly rated in SEO.

In SEO writing, titles are important, whether at the page level (Meta Title or Title) or in the article (H1, H2, H3, etc.). They will guide readers and robots in understanding the text. So it would be best to have short titles containing your keyword. 

The meta description (or metadata) is the text in internet search results below the URL. It, therefore, makes it possible to detail a page's content and encourage the reader, or not, to click on the link, hence its importance. Most engines display the first 150 characters. So aim for conciseness and a good understanding from the start. You can take it up and develop it to create your first paragraph, which should also be very concrete and hotly inciting. 

You only have 155 characters for your meta-data, so you must use it wisely. This is an important point.

To make your text consistent and your site expert on the subject, you must create links in your text to other content. Ideally, place links to other pages on your site on your keywords. Remember to add links to external sites to support that you join a circle of experts on the subject, but do not place them on your keywords.

The image adds attractiveness to the text and provides a different inlet into the content. The reader can, thus, be provided with an up-to-par image. To do so, you point in natural referencing; you can give it a name, a caption and an alternative text—Alt attribute—consistent with the general content.

  • Your image should not be too heavy, so the page loads quickly, especially on mobile. Prefer JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP and WebP formats.

My personal experience says that good photos keep the audience on the screen. 

Smart speakers are entering the natural referencing race. If you want Alexa, Google or Siri to talk about you, you must take care of your voice SEO. So natural referencing applies to voice search. To be picked up by smart assistants in their answers, it is advisable to take the question you are answering in the title of a paragraph and answer it at the beginning of the text in less than 200 characters.

In this article, we tried to tell you how to write the best-optimized content for your website by using important SEO principles. If you have an opinion in this field, share it with us here!

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Susith Nonis

Susith Nonis

I'm fascinated by the IT world and how the 1's and 0's work. While I venture into the world of Technology, I try to share what I know in the simplest way with you. Not a fan of coffee, a travel addict, and a self-accredited 'master chef'.