Like any other skills, the art of crafting engaging and user-friendly blogs can be easily improved with a little bit of hard/smart work and a whole lot of practice.
And contrary to the popular belief, there is no secret on how to write SEO friendly blog posts. There are simple steps and guidelines that you need to follow to make sure that your blogs are SEO friendly.
Steps as small as the title and structure of the post to text format, the subheadings, and paragraphs. All these small points might seem insignificant but they have a big part to play in the game of search engine rankings.
Most successful brands and businesses understand that publishing SEO friendly content will improve the online searchability and visibility of their content.
So, what exactly is an SEO friendly blog post?
In simple words, Search Engine Optimized blog posts or SEO friendly blogs are simply a combination of quality content that is optimized for the users’ reading pleasure as well as for making it easier for search engines to understand what the blog is about by adding appropriate keywords, right heading texts, Internal links, external links, and few more elements.
Why should you write an SEO friendly blog?
The basic intention of optimizing any content using SEO is to publish content that both search engines, as well as users, can understand.
Apart from achieving improved online visibility, there are various reasons to write SEO friendly blogs such as boosting your organic SERP ranking, enhancing your viewer’s user experience, decreasing your sale cycle time, and more.
In short, it is the combined effort, high-quality content and adhering to the SEO guidelines that makes for a good blog.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about how to write SEO optimized blog posts
- Research blog topics
- Define and use keywords throughout the blog
- Prepare the blog post’s structure
- Write short and crisp paragraphs
- Optimize meta title and meta description
- Optimize image and Alt tag
- Craft proper URL
- Use proper heading tags
- Add internal and external link
- Keep updating your content
I will be expanding on 10 easy steps, which will ensure that when your blog is ready to be published, it is an extremely SEO friendly blog post.
10 actionable tips on how to write SEO friendly blog posts
1. Research your blog topics
Most people who understand the concept of SEO, know that a well-optimized SEO friendly blog will generate higher traffic, as the post is ranked higher. However, it doesn’t mean that blogs with irrelevant and off the topic content will also rank high.
Thus, it is critical to come up with relevant topics beforehand and include them in your SEO blog post strategically.
The first step to writing an SEO friendly blog post is to conduct broad research into the topic, making a note of recurring keywords, bookmarking relevant links and blogs, etc. This step, like any research, requires certain planning and it is advisable to have a theme in mind before starting the research.
I am constantly reading blogs and articles that teach me a thing or two about the latest trends in SEO and digital marketing. Every time I come across something that is interesting, I save the link to my sticky notes.
Whenever I am creating my blog schedule, I make sure to review my collated links in my sticky notes and add all the topics that I believe will help me achieve my goal for the month in my blog calendar.
2. Define and use keywords throughout the blog
It is highly recommended to use keywords and its variations throughout the entire blog. This can easily be done by using tools like SEMRush, to find out relevant keywords and variations that are closely related, as well as their usage frequency and KD (Keyword Difficulty).
However, it is not advisable to cram in a large number of keywords in the blog posts, as it is considered webspam or spamdexing, a method of gaining an unfair rank advantage in the search engine ranking.
Read my Keyword Research Guide for more details.
3. Prepare a well-defined structure for the blog posts
A well-written SEO friendly blog post must have the best blog structure for SEO, containing different ideas in different parts of the post.
Having the blog structure planned out before you actually start writing the blog is highly advantageous, as it is more efficient to write a few hundred words that cover a specific idea of the post, rather than trying to write the entire post in one sitting.
When we are talking about how to write SEO friendly blog, it is important to determine various sections of the SEO friendly blog including the Title, the introduction of the blog, the main body with its subsets, and the conclusion is highly recommended.
Especially, when you don’t have the time to finish writing the entire post in one go, as you can then concentrate on a single subset at one time.
4. Write short and crisp paragraphs
No matter how good the content is, readers will tend to peruse through the content if it is too text-heavy.
If you are looking for the answer for how to do SEO for blog, you must remember that using too many large sentences and paragraphs will demand more attention from the reader, something that is not always possible, especially if the reader is on a mobile device.
It is also recommended to highlight any important points that form the crux of the blog post.
5. Optimizing the meta title and meta description
The next step would be to craft an optimized title and description. This step is very important, as this the title is one the SEO ranking factors and an attractive meta description will urge the viewer to click on your blog link to read more.
Points to keep in mind while crafting the blog title
- Your title should not be more than 55-60 characters to ensure that it’s not truncated on the SERPs.
- Your title must include your target keyword once
- The title is relevant to your blog content
- It should be engaging enough to attract your audience away from so many other competitors
The meta description of the page is the summary that is displayed below the suggested title in the search results page. It must be unique and catchy, as it is limited to 160 characters only.
Once the blog post is finished, it is suggested to check whether the meta title and description accurately describe the content of the post.
If not, make required modifications as it will really improve the ranking of the blog post.
6. Optimizing the image and alt tag
Images and other media can drastically improve the quality of a blog post. A lot of people believe that search engine bots don’t consider the relevancy of the image when it comes to SEO.
This means that most bloggers miss out on making their images SEO friendly, which could immensely help in improving the blog’s ranking.
What most people don’t realize is that it is easier to rank on the image searches which can also bring a significant amount of traffic to your blog.
Check out my step by step guide on How to do Image SEO to get more traffic
7. Craft a proper URL
URL is the blue underlined link that your readers will click on the SERP to reach your blog. It is important for User Experience and it is an important SEO ranking factor.
Typically, the URL is auto-generated by your CMS (content management system) based on the title of the blog post. However, it is advisable to remove any extra words to keep your URL more SEO friendly.
You can change the permalink manually from your CMS settings to ensure that the URL is understandable.
While creating your URL, it is advisable to use your Keyword in the URL itself for better optimization.
Additionally, ensure that all the words in your URL are only in lower case, avoid sentence casing as well as capital case. It is also important to make sure that you use “-“ to separate the words in your URL. Once again, you might have to change the permalink structure from your blog settings.
8. Use proper heading tags
Heading tags refer to the various headers used in the blog including the Title, the heading, and the subheadings.
Certain rules must be followed while using heading tags to ensure that the blog post is SEO friendly.
There must be only one H1 tag i.e. the Title of the blog, which must contain your target keyword. All other sections titles and subsection titles must also have heading tags H2, H3, and so on.
Using such heading tags helps the search engine spiders in understanding the content of the blog post.
9. Adding internal links and external links
A good way to increase the ranking of your blog posts is to try and add internal and external hyperlinks. You can do this by adding links to other relevant posts within your blog site which will in turn help search engines find new pages on your website
Usually, blog posts should contain internal links as it will increase the likelihood of readers staying on your blog for a longer duration.
Moreover, it helps search engines discover new blog posts on your website or blog.
This is because the search engine spiders are programmed to follow any link, and add it to their index unless it’s a ‘no-follow’ link. It is one of the most effective methods for optimizing your content of search engines.
External links refer to hyperlinks that take the readers to relevant blogs written and published by other people i.e. if the link opens up a different website than the one on which the blog is hosted.
While this may feel counterproductive as there is a change that it will reduce the time readers spend on your blog but it is a great way to piggyback on the domain authority of other industry expert bloggers as well as a quid-pro-quo technique to gain high-quality backlinks
10. Keep updating your content
The last step in creating an SEO friendly blog is a dynamic one, that is updating the content regularly. Modifying older blog posts to have newer, more relevant content has many upsides.
- You will have a higher number of Google Indexed pages which is an indicator of a stronger domain and website
- It will urge your readers to keep visiting your blogs
- You can use it as an excuse to touch base with your readers
- Although it’s hard, it will give you an edge over your competitors
- It will do wonders for your writing skills
- More page views mean better ranking
Conclusion
As you understand now, making use of Search Engine Optimization is one of the simplest methods for increasing online engagement and presence.
Just Googling the word “SEO” gives you over 58,20,00,000 search results in half a second, but only a very tiny fraction of top-ranked pages will generate most of the traffic.
If you want to make it big in the field of SEO to optimize your blog better, check out my step by step guide on how to become an SEO expert.
In this article, we learned that following the blog SEO tips like researching your blog topic, structuring your blog, writing short and crisp paragraphs, optimizing your blog title and meta descriptions, and more can significantly make your blog more SEO friendly and get higher rankings.
By following the ten strategies explained above, you can begin writing SEO friendly blogs in no time.
Did I miss out on any important blog SEO tips? Let me know in the comments if you have secrets of your own on how to write SEO friendly articles and how to optimize a blog.
I think for the sake of SEO not to be put more keywords. Using semantic words will be good and LSI keywords will give you seo boost.
Thank you for the article.
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