Making SEO friendly content - Part 2

Hi Learners,

Welcome back to my blog. In our previous posts, we started conversations about the role of content in SEO and how to build SEO friendly content that impresses search engines like Google. If you missed Part 1 of this series, be sure to read through that first. You can find it here. Picking up the threads from where we left, lets get started with more parameters and pointers that will help us create better content for our business and our clients.

Content Variety

Lets understand this with an example. When i search for a celebrity term "Vidya Balan" on google. There are 2 different pages that Google has an option to show.

Type A

Type B

Lets evaluate components of Type A

Pros:

• Secure site (https://)

Cons:

• Url structure not relevant to my search query

Variety of content

• Headline
• Image
• Too much text in the latter half of the page. (Click on Type A to see the actual page)

Now lets look at Type B

Pros:

• Clear URL string explains the nature of the page.

Cons:

• Not secure (http://)

Variety of content

• Relevant profile & cover image
• Very relevant website menu
• Video Gallery
• Image Gallery
• Social links
• Search box for searchable content
• News and updates

From the above comparison its clear that Type B is a clear winner. This is because Type B provides wide variety of information to a user who might search for the term "Vidya Balan" and the probability of engagement is higher as compared to Type A

Take away: Google prefers pages with a wide variety of rich content on a single concept. So the next time you want to write content for your website, make sure you add every possible snippet of information your users might need to know in different content formats.

Content layout

Websites with a smooth flow of content and a neatly charted layout are liked by users and hence liked by Google. There have been pages that were popular just because they were awesome to look at! (Remember Yahoo! News home page?) Today all types of content providers are in the race to show neatly aligned content. They go as far to change the look and feel of their websites to make content reader friendly. App businesses like Inshorts started with a swipe up content culture which is now a norm in news publishing apps. Below are two comparisons of articles from Times of India and Livemint

Times of India article page

Livemint article page

Of the above two, its is obvious that Livemint article seems to be more readable and encourages the user to read more. This logic could be applied to all types of websites with rich content across diversified verticals.

With these two suggestions, you can improve the engagement of your websites by leaps and bounds while making it likeable by search engines. 

Hope you enjoyed reading this post. Do come back next week to explore more. Feel free to reach out through the contact form on the site or leave your views on the comments section. I would be happy to hear your side of the story too.

Have a great week ahead.

Happy learning,

Mitul Shingadia