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The content that is written or updated recently and in simple and easy language ranks better in search engines. Use spend more time reading easy content whereas difficult words are skipped most of the time without understanding the meaning. I am sharing some secret tips that nobody will tell you. Very few people know about the ranking factors of content. Most of the time you listen about keyword density and natural writing style.
To make your content SEO friendly, you should keep the content ranking factors in mind.
There are 6 main content ranking factors
- Freshness of Content
- Uniqueness of Content
- E-A-T
- Make it featured
- Keyword prominence
- Keyword proximity
- Keyword density
The freshness of The Content
Recently posted or updated content always ranks better. Google emphasised the freshness of content in 2011.
Search results, like warm cookies right out of the oven or cool refreshing fruit on a hot summer’s day, are best when they’re fresh. Even if you don’t specify it in your search, you probably want search results that are relevant and recent.
We completed our Caffeine web indexing system last year, which allows us to crawl and index the web for fresh content quickly on an enormous scale.
Source – Google’s Blog on Content Freshness
We always recommend keeping your content fresh and relevant to the current time. The other option to keep your content afresh is to keep updating the content periodically.
Webmasters generally keep changing the dates of articles to make them look fresh. It is really not recommended to practice it. It will eventually get the byline date removed as a penalty from Google.
The uniqueness of the content
The uniqueness of the content is a good factor but it can not be maintained always. So, try at your best level to maintain uniqueness with relevance. Relevant content is more important than unique one. But please provide the details that have not been provided so far.
E-A-T: Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness
The content written with expertise knowledge, authoritativeness and trustworthiness is loved by the search engines. While writing the content, give references that can verify your content. Provide the complete details of your subject even if the content is getting bigger. Google has clearly mentioned in earlier blogs that such content is prioritised.
We consider a variety of other quality signals, and to understand if our mixture of quality signals is working, we run a lot of tests. We have more than 10,000 search quality raters, people who collectively perform millions of sample searches and rate the quality of the results according to how well they measure up against what we call E-A-T: Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.
Source – Blog on How Google delivers reliable informations on search
Make it featured
When you use a markup language, it creates change for your content to appear feature. Use the features snippet schema and apply an object that matches the correct snippet type.
For example: If you are using a self-hosted video on your web page add VideoObject. For self-hosted Audio files and images, you are supposed to use AudioObject, and ImageObject respectively. If you are writing about a person, you should use Person Schema.
You can read more about schemas and their types here: https://schema.org/docs/schemas.html
Although it depends on Google to show featured content or not, featured content is shown on relevant search queries.
Definition of Keyword prominence
Keeping your keywords close to HTML tags is practised under keyword prominence.
Some of the common HTML tags are <h1>…<h5>, <p>, <br>, <em>, <strong> <alt>. Keep your targeted keywords close to these tags. It creates weightage for the keyword.
Definition of Keyword Proximity
Distance between the use case of keywords in the content is called keywords proximity. This is another SEO ranking factor.
Write your content in natural language. Don’t hesitate to use a demonstrative pronoun. Google understands what you are trying to convey through that. Using your keyword excessively in the content may lead your webpage to lose its ranking.
The other most hyped content ranking factor is Keyword density. Not even a single interview for the SEO position is ended without asking about it. This is an overstated term.
Definition of Keyword density
Per cent of keyword usage in the content is called keyword density per cent.
Most SEO experts and Some ultracrepidarians think it should be 1% to 2 %. But I always emphasize using natural language. This article is to tell you about the writing techniques for SEO-friendly content. Did you see anywhere that the keywords are being used over and over again? But there must be the reputation of keywords with changes in order. And this is natural. That’s why Search Engines accept it.
How to measure if the article is good or not for getting a ranking on top?
Check, how much time a user is spending on reading. How much your content is making them stick to the page pursuing the next paragraph. Writing content in small paragraph increase the readability. Content with the highest readability is preferred while deciding the search ranking.
Check the following metrics to understand the quality of your content and website.
Avg time on page
This metric tells you about the time spent by the visitor. The more time is spent means your content is being read carefully. Visitors are paying attention to the content you have written on the page. The content is useful and fulfils the need.
Avg Session Duration
A session lasts 30 minutes by default in case of an idle state or if the user closes the browser window. Check the time of sessions. A user may browse more than one page in a session. This metric indicates the signals as the above-mentioned metric (Avg time on page). The websites that host video, images, stories and other interactive content have higher avg session duration. E-Commerce websites have higher session durations.
Pages Per Session
How many pages are being browsed or viewed in an active session is measured by this metric. This is a good indicator to understand the relevance and quality of the content of a website.
Bounce rate
If a user comes to a page and closes it without any interaction or in less than the specified spending time on the page, it is called bounced visit. The content should be good enough to get the user engaged with it. You can use some effective ways to reduce the bounce rate.
Effective Writing Style
Try to write your content with bullet points. If it is not possible then try to write in a small paragraph with separate headings. I was not able to write in that, that’s why I chose to write my content in small paragraphs.
This is what I learned from my 12 years of experience. There might be more technical terms but trust me, if you are on this page, it’s because of its ranking that I earned through my writing style.
Please share your thoughts in the comment section if you think I am missing something.