So, you’re finally ready to post more high-quality content for your readers. That’s great! But don’t click on that publish button just yet. Make sure to check if your article is SEO-friendly first.
After all, aside from your online users, search engines must be able to read and understand what your content is all about. And there are two ways to ensure its SEO-friendliness.
One is to know how to write optimised content, and the other is to use SEO tools, plugins or extensions for checking and troubleshooting.
In this post, we’ll give you a rundown of things to focus on when creating an SEO-friendly article.
We’ll also cite some helpful tools you can use for optimum results.
What is an SEO-Friendly Article and Its Importance
An SEO-friendly article is a content that search engines can find, understand and display to online users.
Using the right keywords, adding titles and headings, and implementing a schema markup are some techniques to help them read your work.
But an SEO-friendly article needs more than the technical side of optimisation. Its creative aspect is also essential to make your content appealing to human users.
That means SEO-friendly content should also be engaging, concise and mobile-friendly.
All these efforts combined contribute to SEO-friendliness and, eventually, better search rankings, high organic traffic and good conversion.
In other words, writing high-quality and optimised articles should have both types of audiences in mind.
How to Check an Article for SEO-Friendliness
Preparing and checking an SEO-friendly article sounds like a lot of effort and fine-tuning, right? Don’t worry.
To help, here are the key elements you should understand and monitor.
Once you know how to tweak your content using these guidelines, writing SEO-friendly blog posts and articles should be second nature.
1. Check Keywords
Keywords are crucial in writing an SEO-friendly article since they act as your link to search engines and users. So, choose them wisely.
Start your content planning with the target keywords you want to use first instead of the topic itself.
Also, focus on long-tail keywords. These may have low search volume, but they also have low competitiveness.
That means you’ll have better chances of ranking with these terms and connecting with users looking for specific information or topics.
Keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner, AnswerThePublic and KWFinder can make selection easy.
Google’s Autocomplete feature also helps incorporate search intent during keyword research.
Hiring an SEO agency to assist you is an option, too. You can also analyse your competitors and reuse their search terms for a better article.
Once you’ve selected your key terms and started writing, make sure to:
- Check keyword density. Keyword frequency or density is the number of times you use a term or phrase in your article. Yoast plug-in on WordPress and other similar tools can check this for you. But if you want to do it manually, a safe gauge would be to mention your keyword for every 200 words or so of your article or blog post.
- Distribute your keywords properly. For an SEO-friendly article, check if you used your primary keyword at the start and end. Then, insert it within the post where it makes sense. Keep it natural and avoid keyword stuffing.
- Add keywords in the right places. Other parts where your keyword should appear include the URL, title, meta descriptions, image ALT tags and article headings.
2. Check Title and Meta Description
Your content title and meta description are the first things users see on the search results. So, optimise and check them if you’re going for an SEO-friendly article.
For instance, see to it that your focus keyword is in your title and description. Ideally, your keyword should be at the beginning of your title.
However, there are instances where using the exact keyword is not possible. In that case, use at least the main keyword.
Then, follow the ideal character limit for each: less than 60 for the title and up to 160 for the description. Doing this ensures both components are readable and concise.
Lastly, make your title and description catchy, informative and accurate. Adding emotional modifiers like “best”, “how to”, or “free” can help drive up your click-through rate (CTR).
Constructing your title in question form is another technique to catch your readers’ attention.
If you want, you can also use CoSchedule to check your article title. The detailed results even include tips on how to make it better.
3. Check Heading Tags
Headings and sub-headers can enhance SEO-friendly content in several ways.
One of their roles is to divide a thousand-word article into more readable and digestible sections.
This function benefits both search engines and users. Specifically, search crawlers or bots use headings to understand your content.
On the other hand, readers use them to skim through your entire article and quickly find what they need.
Headings also allow content writers to insert focus keyphrases and improve keyword density.
When you check your SEO-friendly article, add the correct heading tags and apply the hierarchical mode.
That means the heading 1 tag goes to your main title, heading 2 for the main article sections, and heading 3 to the subsections.
4. Check Content Length and Quality
The optimal length of an SEO-friendly article is about 2000 words, and the minimum is between 300 and 500 words.
However, these numbers are only suggestions. Rather than limit your article to a specific word count, you can check the top-ranking results discussing your chosen topic.
Then, use these as your gauge for content length. You can also check your Google Analytics report and analyse how users respond to your blog posts.
For example, find out what’s common among your most-read articles or those that lead to high conversions, then use it as your pattern or template.
Also, remember to give more weight to quality, correctness, accuracy and clarity when creating web articles.
Here are some tips for better content quality:
- Write in short sentences and paragraphs. Keep your sentence construction simple and make your idea easy to understand. Avoid fluff and jargon.
- Check for spelling and grammatical errors. A well-written, error-free post is a sign of authoritativeness. So, always proofread your work, either manually or with a tool like Grammarly.
- Use different text formatting options. When applicable, turn a long discussion into bullet points, numbered lists of highlighted text. This technique makes your article visually appealing and more readable on mobile.
- Incorporate salience when writing. Google now uses NLP (natural language processing) when reading content. This concept means simplifying your writing so that robots and humans can understand your topic with the least effort. Try using Google’s Natural Language AI to analyse your text for salience.
- Update your content. Checking SEO-friendly articles is a continuous process. So, publish new content, avoid duplicates and update outdated posts when needed.
5. Check Internal and External Links
Adding links to your content has several advantages to your SEO efforts. Linking to reputable external resources, for example, boosts your credibility.
The quality and number of your outbound links within the article significantly increase its ranking potential. Moreover, these credible links help build trust with the users.
One way to do this is to create links when mentioning technical terms, studies or statistical data in your content.
As for internal linking, this helps search engines understand article relevance. It also makes readers stay longer on your site and help reduce bounce rates.
All in all, external and internal links are supplements, allowing your readers to learn more.
So, make sure to add some to your SEO-friendly content and check that there are no broken links. Also, make your anchor text descriptive.
6. Check Image Optimisation
Images enhance your text content. They make articles, particularly long-form ones, more interesting and readable.
And when chosen wisely, images can also boost conversion rates. But the thing is, only human users can see these images, while crawlers or bots cannot.
For this reason, make sure to add ALT text or tags to media inserted in your SEO-friendly article. Ideally, add your primary keyword in the ALT description and make it informative.
Human users will not see the ALT tags, but crawlers can use them to determine the images’ relevance to the search results.
Aside from ALT information, optimise the size of your chosen images. Photos that are too big can slow down your load time.
So, use image editors like Squoosh to adjust image size without affecting the quality.
7. Check Schema
When you check your SEO-friendly article, add schema markups to it. These are coded language that helps crawlers understand your content better.
Implementing a schema markup also enhances how your article appears on the search results page. However, this checking task requires some coding experience if you do it manually.
But there are some automated tools, like Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper, to mark your blog posts. You may also check and add other relevant plugins that work with your content management system.
WP Schema Pro and Yoast SEO, for instance, are some examples that apply to WordPress. These tools have automated functions that should make markup generation easier.
Once done, don’t forget to test and validate your schema markups. This extra step prevents structured data errors.
Also, you might want to read this previous schema markup article and see how it can benefit your local SEO.
8. Check Mobile Responsiveness
A statistical report in 2022 shows that more than half of web traffic worldwide comes from mobile devices.
The 2021 ranking signal update on core web vitals from Google also centres on providing a better user experience.
All these emphasise the importance of making your content or blog posts mobile-friendly to rank higher, avoid penalties and gain more traffic.
So, when you check your SEO-friendly article, ensure it is easy to navigate and read on mobile, tablet or desktop devices.
Running your page on Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test also helps.
9. Check Page Load Speed
What do you do if a web page does not load fast enough? Like most users, you’ll probably leave and look for another page.
And this is why you should regularly check your loading time to ensure an SEO-friendly article. Otherwise, you might be risking your traffic volume and conversion rate.
Page load speed is how long your text and visuals appear on the page after a user clicks it. And most people cannot wait longer than 3 seconds for a page to load.
So, the first thing to do is to use a speed test tool, like Google PageSpeed Insights. This tool will rate your page speed from 0 to 100. The higher the score, the better.
It will also provide helpful suggestions to make your page load faster. The good news is most page speed issues only require quick fixes.
Some sample solutions are compressing images, limiting redirects and removing unnecessary plugins.
Final Thoughts
The ideal way to check an SEO-friendly article is to learn how to write optimised content first. Then, use tools to enhance it.
It can be time-consuming and arduous at first. But these content creation best practices let you make the most of your resources.
And once you have the basics down, you’ll get increased leads and loyal customers, better rankings and links, and a higher conversion rate in return.
So, start your content creation right and keep impressing your audience, whether they are machines or humans.
