We’re all concerned that our content is among Google’s first choices. That’s why we focus on meeting all SEO requirements. But sometimes we forget the importance of content itself. Both search engines and readers are interested in good text. In my article How to improve my page's SEO? I was already talking about this in the third point. I will now address it in more depth. If you haven’t found a good balance between quality content and optimizing SEO, this guide is for you.
There are many ways to attract people to your website. One of them is to generate content. This way, potential customers can reach you through your blog. In addition, this is a cover letter, you tell them with your content that you are an expert on a topic. (If you need more ideas to have more visitors, you can read 10 Ways to Generate More Traffic Towards your Website).
However, there is no point in having a blog where content is scarce, copied from other sites, or unclear. Why? Because even if you use the right keywords, search engines won’t be interested in your content. They usually don’t recommend sites with little content. Neither do those who have the same as other sites with a better reputation. All of that can be detected by bots.
On the other hand, bots also detect what people like. Visits to your site may come but content may not keep them. If your posts are difficult to read or just don’t make sense, the content will scare your visitors away. On the contrary, if the content is pleasant to read, if it solves a problem, people will return to it. This will make you rise in the rankings and appear in the first search results.
That’s why it’s important to keep quality in mind when generating content. It affects SEO as much as keyword selection. In my opinion, there are three points to cover when generating content:
None of the three are divine gifts, all are within your reach. Your content acquires those characteristics when you put certain skills into practice. And to develop those skills there are resources at your fingertips. Let’s review each one.
Clarity is a feature of well-written texts. A clear text is attractive because it straightforwardly conveys information. But how is it achieved? Because if we all know how to write we should all know how to be clear, right? Not necessarily.
Many people are used to writing as they speak. Spoken language is different from written. In the speech, we have the person in front of us and we can ask him when we don’t understand something they've said. We do not have that luxury in the text, which is why we must ensure that we do not get bogged down in matters that do not make our point clear.
That’s the key to clarity: knowing what our theme is. For example, in this post, my theme is engaging content with good SEO. It would be weird if I suddenly rambled around telling anecdotes of when I was starting to learn web development. That’s beside the point. It would be annoying for you to have to skip that part to get back to the main issue.
But sometimes there are more serious problems. It happens that despite being talking about a single topic, readers can't understand the message. And well, there may be several problems here that have to do with grammar or spelling. Look at these two sentences:
Which is better understood? Although the first is not impossible to understand, it is not so clear. The second has a better structure. As a general rule, it is good not to write as master Yoda speaks.
On the other hand, you may be keeping the subject of your post and sentence structure well, but your paragraphs are confusing. We are rarely taught to write a single paragraph. I thought for a long time that a paragraph was a minimum of four lines in a row before clicking enter. But in reality, it is, as a sentence, a structure that needs good construction. A paragraph should develop a single idea. Imagine that in this paragraph I also talked about the importance of SEO requirements. It wouldn’t make much sense, would it? It would make me less clear.
Writing clear posts is not easy. Some resort to hiring professional writers as copywriters and it’s not a bad idea. Leaving someone specialized writing your posts saves you time and ensures quality without problems of clarity. But if your financial situation doesn’t allow it, there are many tips and writing courses online. For example, this post: 7 Tips for Clear and Concise Writing. There are also many videos, like this one about writing paragraphs:
In addition to courses and tips, you can be careful with your texts yourself. You can always double-check what you wrote or ask someone to read it. If someone else reads it and gives you feedback, it will be easier to detect how clear it is. Although it’s not easy, you can learn to write and be clearer every time. Don’t despair, it’s a matter of practice.
There is no point in the text being clear if it is boring. If a text sounds like a computer is speaking, you will lose the interest of your reader. What makes a text interesting?
Since we’re not the only ones on the internet talking about our subject, we need to give people another reason to stay. I mean, we have to get our readers' attention. Of course, this is easier said than done. But there are two things to keep in mind when it comes to being interesting: who the text is aimed at and be friendly.
First, we need to know to who the text is addressed. It is not the same to write for web development experts as for people in general with doubts about web development. With the first, I can talk about programming languages without stopping to explain too much. With the second group, I must have other considerations. If a developer gets to read my blog addressed to the general public, they will get bored and vice versa. That’s why it’s important to know who we want to talk to.
On the other hand, you also have to be friendly. While I have just said that you cannot write as you speak, it does not mean that we have to write coldly. We need to sound relaxed like we’re talking to friends. We can joke in writing, make references to pop culture, or ask attention-grabbing questions. This makes reading more enjoyable.
Taking care of these two aspects will cover much of what is necessary to generate interest.
As I said in the introduction, bots know when we copy and paste content from other pages. As a rule of thumb, you have to avoid this at all costs. But we also need to give our texts a particular flavor.
What do I mean? Just as many sites are talking about web development issues, many are as interesting as mine. But I can trust that I sound different from the others. If you are a visual person you can think that there are brands that are distinguished by their colors, their typography, or their logo, this image makes them original. Maybe you recognize the author of a blog by his sense of humor or how it creates controversy. This is about being original.
Originality goes hand in hand with being interesting. They are not the same, you can have interesting content but without distinctive features, otherwise, it is also possible. Although it may well be that one of the reasons why your audience finds you interesting is because of your originality.
On the other hand, originality is not easy to obtain. It takes time to figure out how we like to address our readers and what you want to pick up on as your characteristics. The tip that I find most useful to practice originality is always to use our own words. If you have already made the effort to investigate and not copy and paste, make the effort to write your post as you would say. Trying to sound like someone else who is more successful or sounding like someone we’re not will truncate our originality.
Many writers struggle with originality. That’s why they have written a lot about it. There are blogs, videos, and entire books on the subject. To get started you can read this post on how to write something original here. Remember that there are always guides and tools for everything, including writing.
In the content, there are aspects that we can take care of to improve SEO. Just as in the post we make sure to use keywords, integrate external and internal links and write good meta descriptions, we can structure the content to increase our SEO score. Here are some of the issues to consider:
These SEO points are directly focused on the content. That is, issues we have to take into account when writing. But there are many more SEO requirements, some that have to do with your post internally and others with promoting them. Of these other aspects, there are many tips, but as I mentioned from the beginning, the content itself is often forgotten.
I hope this post has helped you know how to improve your content by taking SEO into account. When it comes to SEO there’s still a lot to discover, I recommend you keep reading: