7 Tips to Write SEO-Friendly Content While Avoiding Plagiarism

SEO-friendly content plays a key role in today’s digital marketing landscape. Since the internet is the largest playing field for digital marketers, it makes sense that the tools to utilize it rise in importance.

SEO is the single most important technique that all digital marketers need to master in order to get their brands more exposure. An important part of doing SEO and improving the SERP ranking of a website is writing SEO-friendly content.

But the thing is, there are only so many ways of writing SEO-friendly content, and when everybody uses them, there is bound to be some plagiarism. So, how do you tackle this problem? Well worry not, in this article, you will learn exactly how to do both things. So, let’s take a look at what you need to do.

1. Do Plentiful Research

First things first, before writing anything you need to know what you are going to write about. One of the most prominent reasons for committing plagiarism is a lack of knowledge. When a writer does not have enough information about their topic, they tend to copy others and commit plagiarism.

Since plagiarism is a dishonest act, it is vilified everywhere, including search engines. They penalize content that has been copied from elsewhere by reducing the page’s rank or completely removing it from their index. Naturally, these outcomes are the worst with respect to SEO.

Doing proper research eliminates these possibilities. When you have enough information to thoroughly discuss a subject, you will never have to plagiarize. And unique content is automatically SEO-friendly.

2. Stick to Your Topic

One quality of non-SEO-friendly content is fluff—Irrelevant text that serves no purpose other than adding more words to a write-up. It is the opposite of sticking to your point.

Why is fluff considered SEO-unfriendly? Well, the reason is simple…User experience is now a measurable ranking factor in SEO. It is primarily measured using two metrics called bounce rate and dwell time.

When you fill your content with fluff, it serves to irk your readers who do not have a lot of time to waste. They just want the information they are looking for quickly. If they find fluff, they realize that there is nothing to be had from that content and leave.

This entire sequence culminates in what we call a “bounce” i.e., a user leaves the page without taking any actions. A high bounce rate leads to poor ranking.

When you only discuss matters related to your topic, you don’t add any fluff to your content. That means that any readers will only find useful information. This results in the user staying and reading the content till the end and possibly moving on to another page on the website. This improves the dwell time which results in better SERP ranking.

Additionally, when you start writing fluff, you raise the chances of committing plagiarism. After all the irrelevant part has to come from somewhere, and more often than not, it comes from other people.

3. Utilize Paraphrasing

Frankly speaking, it is a statistical impossibility to write a perfect article on your first try. Those masterpieces you find in bookstores were not written once either; they went through multiple editing procedures to reach that stage.

Some common things that happen in editing include, but are not limited to:

• Paraphrasing some text,
• Removing things,
• Changing the order in which topics were discussed.
• Dealing with plagiarism

Paraphrasing is one of the more important things on this list. A writer can utilize this technique to alter their text and improve it. In content writing, these improvement amounts to better readability and clear delivery.

Being a writer, you can either paraphrase your content manually or by using different rephrasing tools available online.

A paraphrasing tool helps you to paraphrase online the parts of your text which are somewhat confusing to make them clearer. It replaces some words with synonyms and changes the sentence structure of the content without altering its actual meaning.

By utilizing the paraphrasing tool, you can easily boost the readability and engagement of your content with less effort. As we already know, a good experience has positive effects on SEO.

You can also deal with plagiarism by paraphrasing if the content in question has similar wording as another source. Be mindful, that if the source is attributable, i.e., the plagiarized text is not public-domain, then you need to cite it even after paraphrasing.

4. Write Readable Content

Readability is the number one non-technical factor that can improve or worsen your bounce rate. If your content is hard to read, then most people will not even try to engage with it because it is tiresome to read. This counts as a bad user experience and that can make your content SEO-unfriendly.

Therefore, content writers have to ensure that the reading grade of a write-up is sufficiently low so that a lot of people can successfully engage with it. Failure to do so will result in the reduction of your site’s SERP ranking.

Readability is improved with the following things:

• Using simple words
• Writing simple phrases
• Keeping sentences short
• Keeping paragraphs limited to a few lines (three to five max)

These things are easy to say, but a little difficult to do consistently, but they can be done reliably due to editing.

5. Avoid Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is a black hat SEO technique in which a webpage is littered with keywords to make a search engine think that it is relevant.

Suffice it to say that you should never do it because search engines can easily catch it. The penalties associated with this are also quite harsh. Your site gets a significant decrease in rank, and in severe cases, it can be completely delisted from the search engine index. Obviously, this means that keyword stuffing is not SEO-friendly.

The issue is that nobody actually knows how many keywords are too many, or too few. So, it is best to err on the side of caution and just use your primary keyword two to three times, while all other instances should utilize LSI or long-tailed words.

Don’t ever make the mistake of using the same keyword over and over again.

6. Format Your Content Using Headings, Subheadings, and Lists

Formatting is actually really useful for SEO. If you do it right, it can boost the SEO of the content page significantly.

There are two major advantages of formatting;

• Provides a better user experience
• Improves the crawling of your content

Search engines have to crawl websites and check out what they are offering. If you format your content to facilitate crawling, it will give search engines a better idea of what your content is about. That way they will be able to match it with the right search intent and ensure that you get the proper audience.

Creating headings, subheadings, tables, and bullet points, and using keywords in them appropriately is the best way to utilize formatting to facilitate crawling.

On the other hand, we have human readers. If they find content that has no formatting and is just an uninterrupted stream of text, then they will be repulsed. However, if they find headings that segregate sub-topics easily, then they will at least navigate to the heading that they want. And you already know how that benefits SEO.

7. Check for Plagiarism After Writing

If you take every conceivable measure for sidestepping plagiarism, there is still a chance that you will have some copying in your content. Everyone knows that copied content is not good for SEO because it can get penalized. So, checking for it before publishing is mandatory.

There is only one real way of checking for plagiarism and that is to rely on online plagiarism-detecting tools. That’s because it is not feasible to expect a human to accurately find plagiarism in some content.

A free plagiarism checker is usually good enough to check the plagiarism and uniqueness of your content. They can find plagiarism accurately, but they may be limited by how many words they can check at once. For short-form content that is around 1,000 words long, they are perfect.

For checking long-form content a free plagiarism checker may not be enough. That’s when you may have to use a paid one to get access to more words.

Almost all plagiarism checkers provide a detailed report that highlights the parts which are copied. This makes it easy to deal with them. You can edit or remove these parts to get rid of plagiarism.

Conclusion

And there you have it, seven tips to write SEO-friendly content while avoiding plagiarism.

Since writing unique content is automatically SEO-friendly, any steps you take to ensure that, are tips for creating SEO-friendly content. In these seven tips, we have covered tips that either only deal with SEO, or tips that deal with both plagiarism and SEO.

By applying them in your own content writing, you can improve the ranking of your content pages and get more traffic.