How to optimize a blog post for SEO
Writing a blog post and writing an OPTIMIZED blog post for users and search engines, are two different things. The latter is a true skill that can be very time consuming. This is because you have to choose your topics wisely and make lots of research before writing your blog posts.
Alot of people think that writing a blog post is complicated but the truth is that its not as complex as most people think it is.
Infact, you dont have to be a professional writer inorder to publish quality blog posts. There are some simple steps to follow to ensure that everything you publish on your website or blog is both professional and SEO friendly.
In this article, we'll be giving an in-depth guide as to how you can properly optimize your blog posts for SEO in order to boost organic traffic to your website.
Why you should Optimise Your Blog Post.
Optimizing your blog posts for SEO is essential as it helps you consistently get more traffic to your website.
Since search engines are often the largest source of organic traffic to your website, so you'll need to optimise your blog post inorder to be able to rank your posts.
If you’re not optimizing your blog post for SEO, then you’re limiting the amount of traffic to your site.
An optimized blog posts also keeps readers engaged which in turn boosts your dwell time making your post rank higher on Google.
In this post we'll be giving an in-depth guide as to how you can optimize your blog posts properly inorder to generate traffic to your site organically.
Make proper keyword research.
One of the major mistakes beginners make, is publishing blog posts without doing proper research. You can't write an optimized blog post using your gut instinct. You don’t need to rely on blind guesses, especially when you can easily do keyword research to find out exactly what your users are looking for.
Keyword research is a technique used by content creators and SEO experts to gather valuable information about their target audience. Inorder to know what they're interested in, as well as questions they're asking. Keyword research tools help you discover topics and learn more about your target audience through search engine data.
You can use these keywords to plan your content strategy. This will ensure that you write about topics that people are actually looking for, and it’s a great way to build an engaged audience.
We recommend using keyword research tools like Semrush, Ubersuggest, Google keyword planner, Ahrefs etc. They offer in-depth keyword data, competition analysis, keyword position tracking, and tons of other useful features. You can also use question research tools such as answerthepublic to know what questions people in your blog niche are asking.
Some of them also help you discover LSI and related keywords, readability, language tone, and average article length.
After you have done your keyword research and discovered keyword ideas, You'll need to choose a topic with low competition in order to maximize your chances of ranking.
- Add Focus Keyphrase.
The next step would be to find the Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords. These are the searches related to your focus keyword.
Example; if you're writing a finance related blog post then good LSI keywords would be Capital, Investment, Budget etc.
You need to incorporate as many of these keywords in your content as possible, as it helps Google to have a general idea of what your blog post is all about. It also makes your post a lot more professional.
Transition words help people scan through your text and understand the relationship between sentences and paragraphs. For example, let’s say that there are three reasons for people to buy your product. You should use signal words like: ‘first of all’; ‘secondly’ and ‘finally’. Also, words like ‘however’, ‘similarly’ and ‘for example’ give a clear signal to your readers. Transition words are therefore very important to add structure to your text.
It is very important that you refrain from keyword stuffing your blog post, as it's irritating to readers. Search engines are pretty good at detecting keyword stuffing.
Utilize SEO friendly titles.
The title of your blog post is very important for search rankings.
A good blog post title makes your article more relevant to the search query. More importantly, it motivates users to click on your article when they see it in the search results.
You can make your blog post title more SEO-friendly by using your focus keyword in the title.
Create SEO friendly title
Aside from adding your focus keyword, we also recommend making your headline catchy and click-worthy. That’s because your organic click-through rate (CTR) plays an important role in SEO.
The best way to do this is to use a headline analyzer tool. This will evaluate your headline and offer tips to improve your headlines to make them more engaging and click-worthy.
- Pay attention to your Headings.
There is only one h1 tag on the page – Which is usually the same as the <title> of the post, although it doesn’t have to be the same.
What is important is to have only one h1 tag and that heading to include your target keywords.
Use headings in a hierarchical mode: The title of the post is the h1 tag and then the main sections should have an h2 and the subsections an h3.
So, the order of the tags should be H1->H2->H3.
The reason that you should have your content organized in this structural way is to make It easy for both users and search engine crawlers to be able to analyse your content.
Increase your word length.
What most people don't know is that the length of their blog post is a ranking factor when it comes to SEO. Make sure your blog post has a minimum of 300 words.
Studies have shown that longer blog posts tend to perform better in search results when compared to shorter ones. An in-depth blog post that has references to studies and provides useful information is much more likely to get ranked on search engines when compared with posts that are short and simple.
However, this doesn't mean that shorter blog posts will not rank well.
At the end of the day it all depends on your topic. and the quality of your content but if you can publish longer content then you should.
You can use your competitors' blog posts as a reference, to know how long you need to make yours.
Optimize your Meta description.
The meta description is an additional text that appears in SERPs to let readers know what the link is about.
it's like the summary of a blog post in less than 200 characters.
It is important to optimize your meta description length, because Google may choose to show your description in the results. The description should be informative and captivating in order to encourage users to click your link and visit your blog.
Note: Nowadays, it's not guaranteed that your meta description is always pulled into SERPs as it once was. As you can see in the above image, Google pulls in other parts of your blog post that includes the keywords searched, presumably to give searchers optimal context around how the result matches their specific query.
Use multimedia elements.
Images, graphs, infographics, videos, statistics, and other media elements not only make a blog post interesting and easy to read, they also boost user retention time and enhance the quality of the content.
Search engines can't see images the way we humans can, so your alt image text tells search engines what an image is about. If your images rank so will your page so you should pay attention to your image title and Alt text.
All you have to do is to name your image and describe what it's about in the ALT TEXT. The ALT Text of an image, is another good opportunity for you to insert related keywords into your blog post.
For example, if you are publishing an image thats related to cupcake recipes then the name of the image should be something like, best-cupcake-recipes.jpg.
As for the ALT TEXT, You'll need to describe the image i.e. Best Cupcake Recipes.
Avoid keyword stuffing your image title and Alt text.
Always keep image file sizes low and limit the number of videos you embed on a single page. You can compress your images with free online tools like Compress2go, veed.io, youcompress etc
Add links when necessary.
Whenever you publish a new post on your website, try to ‘link’ it to already published posts on your blog. By adding internal links to your blog posts, search engines will be able to discover new pages on your website. It’s another way to give search engines information on what a page is all about.
It will make your new blog post, and the existing posts, stronger because you’re showing authority on the subject. it also increases dwell time by enabling your users to be able to visit different pages on your website.
It is one of the techniques you can use to reduce the bounce rate and keep users on your website for an extended amount of time.
Categorize your blog post.
Search engines, use your URL to figure out what your post is about. and it's one of the first things it'll crawl on a page. You have the opportunity to optimize and categorize the URLs of your posts. So make sure you include relevant keywords in your post.
URL structure acts as a categorization system for readers, letting them know how to navigate easily on your site.
So you should include user-friendly URL structures. Before you publish your blog post, you need to make sure the URL isn't long and does not contain stop words.
The URL structure of your web pages are different from the specific URLs of your posts. Example;
If I want to visit the e-commerce category on your home page, then your URL will look like this.
https://yourblog.com/e-commerce.
This URL structure tells me that e-commerce is a subdirectory within your main blog.
Similarly if I wanted to read an article on your blog within this subdirectory, then your URL would look like this.
https://yourblog.com/e-commerce/how-to-dropship-2022-html
This is an article within the e-commerce category.
Conclusion.
I hope you enjoyed this article as much as I did, if you have any questions or suggestions leave them in the comments.
