What Is SEO-Friendly Content and How Is It Written?

It is obvious that writing is a matter of talent. Writing SEO-friendly content, though, requires a certain amount of technical knowledge. Writing content that is engaging and at the same time SEO-friendly is the best method of bringing free visitors to a website. If you want to write widely read SEO-friendly content you need to develop yourself a little on the technical side and a little on the writing side. Writing SEO-friendly content is not as complicated as you think.

First, this needs to be known: putting more thought than necessary into the technical side of the job is pointless. To write SEO-friendly content you should aim to be natural and to offer benefit to the visitor rather than to the technology.

What is in this article?

• What Is SEO?
• What Is SEO-Friendly Content?
• What Is Semantic?
• Why Should SEO-Friendly Content Be Written?
• How Is SEO-Friendly Content Written?
• Test Your Content Using Originality Tools

What Is SEO?

SEO (search engine optimisation) means, word for word, "search engine optimisation". In that broadest sense SEO can be somewhat complicated for a content writer, and a content producer cannot be expected to have mastered every technical detail of SEO anyway. But to put it briefly, all the optimisation you will do on your site — keyword work, correct use of meta tags, mobile optimisation and writing SEO-friendly content — all falls within the scope of SEO. Fortunately you do not need most of that in order to produce SEO-friendly content.

What Is SEO-Friendly Content?

Content is the most important element presenting your site to search engines and users, the thing that gets you in front of users thanks to search engines. So that the content you have entered on the website can appear in front of users in search queries, search engines such as Google run that content through a series of processes. You can read this article of ours to learn how search engines work.

What is SEO-friendly content? The short definition: we can call SEO-friendly content those pieces of writing where a particular subject is targeted with keywords and keyword phrases, correctly structured and delivering benefit to the user.

Let us take an example and look at the one in my own article. We decided to write an article whose main idea is "SEO-friendly content". The first thing we should do when writing an SEO-friendly article is ask ourselves the questions what do visitors want from us? How do they search for this content in search engines? Although there are many more professional tools such as SEMRUSH that measure what users are looking for, to start with we can also draw a conclusion and set our subject and content by writing search queries practically through Google.

In the search query below, for example, we learned that users search for SEO-friendly article rather than SEO-friendly content. We can set our headline according to that result.

If you noticed, in the image below the query "content" came after the keyword "article" — that is, precisely the query "how is SEO-friendly content written?". This is exactly where the words "article" and "content" are semantic relative to each other.

What Is Semantic?

These are words close to each other in meaning that can be used in place of one another when needed.

Let us return to our blog site. In our new article we wrote "SEO-friendly" and Google listed what users search for most as suggestions in front of us.

By making searches of this kind and examining the content that comes up in the first positions, we shape our content's subject headings.

The keywords that would probably be used in a piece written about an SEO-friendly article are SEO-related words and phrases such as "SEO, headline, keyword, article example, search engine optimisation". When you evaluate the subject with a relevant, holistic point of view it is assumed to be higher quality.

As Google's artificial intelligence develops it can analyse human behaviour and wishes better. In the past, focusing on just 1–2 words and simply working those words into the text a lot was enough to rank at the top in Google. But now — do you have content that will genuinely add value to the user and answer their questions? We can say that Google now understands this far better.

Why Should SEO-Friendly Content Be Written?

Google's search engine optimisation criteria number more than 200. From the research done to find these 200 clues, working from the clues Google gives, we know that roughly 67 of them relate to content. That reveals the value Google places on strong content.

How Is SEO-Friendly Content Written?

There is no special, specific way of producing an SEO-friendly article. Once you grasp the general Google logic and learn the nuances you need to pay attention to, you will see how easy it is.

The first thing you need to pay attention to is keyword usage. Remember, you are writing content for people to read, not for search engines to read. You should therefore not throw together irrelevant words in order to rank at the top in search engines. If you do, even if you reach the top you will not stay on the throne long. Because another of the criteria Google cares about is how long the user stays on the page. If you produce irrelevant, boring content that gives the user no benefit, the reader will leave the page in the very first paragraphs. That in turn causes your site to lose value in Google's eyes. In that light, to produce your SEO-friendly content with a useful approach you should pay attention to the following:

• Produce content that is easy and readable.
• Produce content that answers users' search queries on the subject.
• Your content must absolutely be original.
• Take care that the title is at least 30 and at most 60 characters.
  (You can visit here for detailed information about the title.)
• The page description should be at least 70 and at most 155 characters.
  (You can visit here for detailed information about the description.)
• Avoid publishing short content. Content that informs and delivers benefit should be at least 300 words.
• Your URL structure should be SEO-friendly
• Focus keyword density should be in the 2–4% range. That is, in a 500-word piece it should appear 10–20 times. More than that can do harm.
• Do not stray from the subject. That can make the visitor flee your site.
• Do not line keywords up one after another or cram them into a single paragraph. Take care to spread them across the content as a whole.
• Take care to use "semantic" words. These words should be relevant to the content's subject. Semantic words benefit the content when used, but their density does not need to be high.

Test Your Content Using Originality Tools

If you want your SEO-friendly content to rank at the top you must produce original content. Google shows no mercy on this either. Even if you have written original content, it is therefore worth checking it before publishing.

You can run an originality check through websites such as "smallseotools.com". Follow the steps below to run an originality check:

1. Click the "https://smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker/" link.
2. Copy your content and paste it into the box on the page.
3. Click the "Check Plagiarism" button.
4. On the page that opens you can check whether your content is original.

Once you are sure you have produced the right content you are ready to publish. Over time, when the page holding your content starts climbing the Google rankings one by one, you will be proud of yourself.