Few would argue today that content is extremely important for marketing purposes. High-quality content is the top-ranking factor among Google’s ranking criteria, so those who want to be seen simply have to delve into the world of content creation. However, not all content is equal and if your goal is to climb up to the number one spot, then you have to put special effort into ensuring that your content works in your favor. Content optimization isn’t difficult, but the checklist for the perfect content in SEO is certainly long; here are the most important elements to keep in mind.

Originality

First of all, for your content to do well on Google, it must be original. Whatever you publish should be new content that is being published for the first time on your website. You (or whoever writes your content) must pay special attention to unique phrasing so that your writing does not get detected as plagiarism. You can use an online plagiarism detecting tool as a safety measure. Besides being original in the sense that it has not been published elsewhere, a piece of content also greatly benefits from originality in the sense of creativity. Articles with a compelling viewpoint and interesting persona are more likely to grab attention and keep visitors on your page longer.

Readability

The second important feature of an SEO-friendly piece of content is that it’s readable. When people are trying to appease the search engine gods, they often forget that it’s actually humans that are going to read that piece of content. Google places great emphasis on visitor experience, so if your content lacks in readability and your visitors bounce upon seeing massive blocks of dry text, you can very well expect to get penalized. Readability manifests in several ways. Choosing an appropriate font, breaking up the text into smaller chunks, and using subheadings, bullet points, and other formatting methods that make the content easier to process will all make your content more readable.

Valuable information

Earlier, we mentioned that your content needs to be original. However, that’s not enough in itself. Your content also needs to be valuable to your audience. It all starts with the relevance of the topic. This can be determined by thorough research of your target audience. Beyond that, the content should contain clear, actionable advice in order to be valuable. You should back up all the claims and information you present with appropriate references to authoritative sources.

Appropriate links

Another important element of a perfect piece of SEO content is linked. We just talked about referring back to authoritative websites by linking sources to information. Naturally, this boosts your trustworthiness in the eyes of your readers. You can also link other relevant sites in your writing, since those contribute to the value of your content, too. However, you should mind the quality of those links and never link to low-quality sites.

Optimization

Ideally, your written content should be accompanied by appropriate illustrations of some sort in order to boost engagement. It is essential that all these elements are properly optimized for the highest loading speed possible. The non-optimal loading speed can negatively affect the user experience your page offers, increasing the bounce rate, lowering the time spent on your website, and ultimately, wreaking havoc on your ranking—page speed is a top-ranking factor, after all.

Appropriate keywords

Keywords are crucial in ranking on search engines, but choosing the keywords that will perform the best is all but easy. In addition to this, you must also maintain the right keyword density to get the most out of your content while not going overboard, risking penalization. Keyword trends change all the time so you need to constantly monitor the developments. If this is out of your capacity, entrusting this task to professionals is the best course of action. If you’re from Australia, find an SEO agency from Sydney to do competitor research on your behalf and determine the most valuable keywords you should implement.

A search-engine-friendly URL

Something that often tends to go under the radar is SEO-friendly URLs. What do these refer to? Simply put, SEO-friendly URLs are short and concise, as well as descriptive, instead of the usual but less than the informative jumble of numbers and letters that say little about the content located on the page. People are more likely to click those links that are described as such links give them a more transparent idea of where they will take them. Ideally, you should include your keywords in your URLs.

Details in place

Finally, attention to detail is what’s going to put the cherry on top when it comes to optimizing your content for search engines. First of all, don’t neglect your meta descriptions. Every piece of content you publish should have a concise but informative meta description that will encourage clickthrough. Beware of duplicate meta descriptions as these have the same effect as other kinds of duplicate content. Additionally, the images your content is accompanied by should also have proper alt texts. The importance of alt texts for SEO cannot be stressed enough; not only when image searches are in question, but for the accessibility of your content, too.

If you ensure that your content fulfills all the criteria that will place it on the first page of search results, your investment in content creation will pay off. Memorize this checklist and don’t let your money go to waste.