Use Formatting To Boost Your SEO Score
A key aspect of your blog posts, website content, and any online content is how it is formatted. Formatting helps the reader digest the information and it helps with search engine optimization. Here are a few tips to help you use formatting to boost your SEO scores.
Know the Purpose of Your Message
It’s difficult to write even one word if you don’t know in advance what the message is. What do you want the reader to get out of reading your content? That’s the purpose of your message.
Keep in Mind Who the Message Is For
When choosing the words for your message it’s important to know the audience. Consider who will be reading the content so that you use the right words. Different audiences like their content delivered in different ways. It’s important to know who they are so that you can word everything correctly.
What Keywords Do You Want to Use
Before you begin to write you should already have completed the keyword research. This research will inform you about the topic that you want to communicate to your audience.
Come up with an Optimized Title
Using the keyword and the idea behind the message craft an optimized title. The title will help inform what you need to write about so that you fulfill the promise of the title.
Create a Post Outline
Now that you have a title, know what you want to tell your audience, and the keywords you want to rank for now you should create an outline. An outline consists of some bulleted points that include your keywords. Each bullet becomes a subheading for your content.
Use Paragraphs, Bold, and Italics
As you work through your content break down each bullet point into paragraphs. Make sure to format your post using heading tags (H2, H3, etc), bolding, italics, and other ways to emphasize the important points of your article.
Headings Create Structure
Remember to use H1, H2, and so forth tags to indicate the start of a new paragraph that goes with the title of the content. Creating chunky content will be easier for readers to scan and also easier for the search engines to find the keywords and rank your content. Our friends over at ProBlogger give excellent tips on how to create scannable content in this article.
Create Subheadings & Bullet Points
When you’re developing the structure of your post, use subheadings, bullet points and other features to make the content stand out, look good, and be easily scannable.
Link to Your Other Relevant Content
Another way to increase the SEO value of the content on your site is with internal linking. Include a link to your other content that your site visitors might find interesting too. This also tells the search engine that you are an authority on that subject.
Link to External Resources
Search engines value scholarly and authoritative information more than random information from just anyone. Boost the authority of your information by linking to sources that prove your point.
Remember that chunking your content with lists, headings, bolding, italics and so forth makes your content easier to read. When it’s easier to read it’s also easier for search engines to categorize it due to your use of keywords, bullet points, headings, subheadings and so forth.
SEO isn’t only for search engines. It’s for your audience too.
