content

There’s no question that SEO, or search engine optimization is a key digital marketing strategy in today’s online world. And content is a crucial component of SEO. If you’re new to SEO or need some help writing content that actually ranks, here are some tips for improving your long-form SEO content.

Include high-quality content

At the end of the day, the name of the game with content is quality. Search engines are ultimately going to select the most helpful, informative, and well-researched articles to serve to users in the search engine results pages. This is why long-form content is so important to SEO strategy. In almost every scenario, long-form content (1,000 words or more) will outperform shorter content pieces any day.

To put together truly well-crafted long-form articles, you need to have a game plan going in. The article needs to be well-structured, and researched, and include specific keywords that you are looking to rank for. And the content needs to be informative and helpful. Do your research and planning to outline a strong long-form article. If you’re struggling for ideas or content, you can always do research to give you food for thought. There are many resources out there to help with this, and some websites even offer free essay topics that you can then turn around and format into long-form articles. These are great options for putting together well-researched, helpful articles.

Include links

To prove your articles credibility, and make it truly helpful to potential readers, you need to make sure that you include links throughout your articles. These links are useful in that they provide additional resources to readers, and they also are a “healthy” SEO practice. When you include other links in your SEO content, it shows search engines that you’re playing nice, and working with other sites to provide the best possible information – not just promoting self-serving content.

In addition, when you link to other websites, it’s more likely that those websites, or new websites will link to you in return, which is also important. Links to your content are a key ranking factor for search engines because they help show authority – if other sites are linking to your content, it’s because you’ve created something useful and worth sharing. This makes your content look good in the eyes of search engines.

Do outreach and promotion

Once your write your content, your job isn’t done. You need to do the work to promote your article, and get the word out there. As mentioned above, getting links to your article from other sites is a very important ranking factor, and a great way to get those links is by doing outreach and connecting with other webmasters.

If you’re able to connect with other interested webmasters, you may be able to arrange a mutually beneficial linking strategy, or set up future guest-posting opportunities to help increase links to your site. Just make sure the website in question is healthy and helpful to users. A link from a poor website may end up doing you more harm than good in the long run.