A Complete Guide on How to Write SEO Friendly Blog Posts
The purpose of writing blog posts is to provide the users with an amazing information and to rank it better on SERP. Optimizing your blog posts would yield content that is both SEO savvy and user-friendly. After all, Google has framed the SEO ranking factors so that users can find the best content when they search for something. That being said, here’s a complete guide on how you can write blog posts that are SEO friendly.
Content is the king
Content is the very source of information for people on the internet. With everything else revolving around it, content forms the backbone of your website. So, as a writer, most of your attention is invested in coming up with the best quality content so that people find it useful. Promoting a poorly written content is a herculean and unyielding task. Here’s how you can craft an excellent blog post for your audience.
1. Think what you would want to write about
Giving a thought on what you are going to write about will help you have a concrete idea to put it into words. It will help you understand what message you wish to convey to your readers. This helps you in understanding if it’s an answer to a question or some specific information you are delivering to the audience. Whatever it is, knowing what exactly to address to your readers will help you craft an essentially high quality content.
2. Do proper research
To deliver the most authentic information, you should perform thorough research and educate yourself on what you are going to write about. However, reading through other’s content doesn’t mean you can copy their style of writing. You are supposed to assimilate the information in a way that can assist you in coming up with unique content for the blog post.
3. Frame a structure
People like to read content that is written in a structured manner. Envision yourself as a reader, you would know it well. Nobody likes to go through a haphazard content. Framing a structure for your content would help the reader scan through the content in a better way. Any good content has three parts- introduction, main body, and conclusion. The introduction should be a short description of the blog topic you are about to enlighten. The main body is supposed to have an elaborated content on the concept you chose to discuss on. Finally, the conclusion is supposed to summarize the entire content, and if there is scope, give it a verdict.
4. Make it readable
There are some rules you should follow to make your blog post readable. Here’s what you should do for it:
- Divide your blog into multiple paragraphs. Each paragraph should only have 3 to 4 sentences.
- Add appropriate images in between the content, possibly at some intervals. By doing this, your content wouldn’t be monotonous.
- Try to explain the concept through bullet points.
- Make sure the length of your blog is at least more than 300 words. However, it would be even better if you write a blog that exceeds 1000 words.
Using keywords
Using keywords is one of the significant SEO factors if you are writing a blog. However, you ought to use the keywords an appropriate number of times and strictly keep away from keyword stuffing. The keywords should be placed naturally and should make sense to the reader. Keywords that are out of context might get you in trouble. You can also avoid keyword stuffing by using variations of your target keyword and long tail keywords. Using keyword tools, like SEMRush, Ahrefs, Keyword Revealer etc. you can find various long tail keywords add in your content.
It’s highly recommended to place the (primary) target keyword in your post title, the first paragraph of the content, one of the headings, and conclusion. Use the target keyword and the long tail keywords throughout the content here and there.
Title
The title is a core part of your blog. It is not just a sentence that tells what your content is about but also represents your content in search results. The title should be catchy so that people would want to read the content. Make sure the title is not too lengthy. If the entire title is not visible, people wouldn’t be encouraged to click on it and read further.
Ideally, the title of your blog post should be 55 to 60 characters. The maximum count can be 70 characters; but nothing more than that. Try to keep the target keyword right at the beginning of the title. Also, including power words, like amazing, best, how to, would help.
Meta Description
The meta description is the part in the search results, right below your title. If you don’t choose to optimize your meta-description, any part from the content would randomly be picked to describe what your content is about- which may not be the appropriate description of your content. This is why you should craft a small and exciting narrative that is less than 156 characters. Include your target keyword in the description as well.
URL Readability
Keep the length of your URL to the minimum. Also, include the target keyword in your URL. Many times, the URL is compiled of a combination of alphabets that does not make any sense. You should always have an eye for it and change it to a bunch of relevant words that go with your content.
Media
Adding media makes the blog more attractive to readers. People love looking at images a lot more than barely reading what’s written. Add relevant images and videos in your blog post. Also, add your target (primary) keyword in the ALT TEXT for all the images. This is one of the SEO factors to rank your post high. Adding infographics that are a pictorial description of what you have written in the post is also an amazing idea.
Adding Links
Adding internal links is one of the best SEO techniques that is capable of fetching you a better rank in SERP. When you write a new post, add links of other posts present on your blog; where it makes sense. This not only helps search engine spiders to crawl through your links easily, but also increases the chances of users reading other posts on your website. If a reader clicks on one of the links and reads the other post as well, you are also decreasing the bounce rate.
Keep Updating your Content
Updating existing content on your website is imperative, as opposed how many writers write a blog and leave it right there. When you update your blog, you make sure the readers have access to the latest information. This is also one of the ranking factors since it helps in increasing the number of pages in the Google index. This directly results in a stronger domain for you.
Conclusion
These are some of the factors you should take care to write SEO friendly blog posts. While optimizing your content is essential, so is the quality of the blog. If your blog is amazingly informative and is optimized well, it would help to enhance the rankings in the best way. To wrap it up, make sure you focus equally on crafting the content and optimizing it to make it SEO friendly.