Many quickly realize that creating content for the web isn't as easy as it seems. There are several different kinds of things you want to convey in just one piece of content-you want it to appeal to relevant readers, evergreen is best, you want it to be original so it gets a lot of social shares, you want it to be crawlable by search engines, and you want it to be linkable. For many, it's the first few pieces to this puzzle that come first. Once you write great content, it will become linkable on its own, right? Almost right.
The truth is, there are a few different things that companies and writers need to do to help make sure that content on a site or blog is linkable. This isn't something that is discussed all too often because it is true that your content will become more linkable the higher quality that content is. However, there are a few extra things you can do to that content, and it doesn't hurt to give yourself a little jumpstart.
Tips and Tricks to Creating Linkable Content to Improve SEO
Below explains a few different tricks and tips to creating linkable content beyond just writing something relevant and original:
- Easy to Share. If your content is already relevant and original, people are probably going to want to share it. You need to make it easy to share this content by adding social buttons to the top of your post so people can just click. Your content is seen as more linkable by those who visit your page (and more people should visit your page if the content has been shared) if the content has a lot of social shares. A post with 300 tweets is always more linkable than a post with 5 tweets.
- Visuals Help. People want to link to articles with good graphics because graphics are easy to understand for readers, yet not always easy to create for websites. If a company feels like they need more graphics but hasn't put them together, your content is perfectly linkable. Consider infographics as a way to get started.
- Always Revise. Sometimes older content isn't quite as linkable because it needs a few tweaks. Go back and look at your content and see if you can make it more relevant by adding a section or revising a few points.
- Thorough Content. If you have a piece of content with a lot of internal and external links, it's probably not going to be as linkable as content that is very detailed and put together. A website isn't going to want to link to your article if it is always referring to other articles. At this point, a website may as well just link to the article you're referring to in your article.
So why does it matter? For those who are unfamiliar, linkable content matters because of SEO. The more people the link to your content, the better you look in the eyes of search engine bots. If these bots see that this piece of content is being mentioned on many different websites, you're going to get a higher ranking on a SERP. Aside from just SEO, creating linkable content actually does mean that many sites find that content valuable enough to mention, and that's great for visibility, social shares, and simply just helping you see that you're on the right track.
Do you have any tricks to creating linkable content?