How to Create SEO-Friendly Blog Posts

Writing high-quality blog posts requires time, energy and skill. While the content of your post is very important and needs to be appealing to your readers, there are also many ways you can increase engagement by working on the structure of the post. Take time to perfect your posts. If people like and appreciate your blog posts they will share it which can help boost rankings. The best way to rank on search engines is to be consistent and to be patient. Your efforts will be realized slowly but surely.

The most important thing to keep in mind while building a blog is understanding the audience you want to reach. You are marketing your blog to them and you want to communicate that you have relevant and up to date posts on the topic you are writing on.

You can start by asking simple questions like:

1. Who is the blog for?
2. What problem are you trying to answer?
3. What words do people use to describe or search for the problem?
4. What do my competitors write on the topic?
5. Do I have anything new to add ? Is my content more relevant?
6. How difficult is it to rank for my keywords? Will it take me months or years?

Thinking about your content carefully is the biggest step before putting in all the work to build your brand and grow organically. There are a number of SEO tools like AHREFS, Moz, Semrush etc to help you narrow down to the exact topic you want to write on and how competitive it will be to rank for it. This brings us to our first point: 

Keyword Research

This is the first step towards writing a blog post. If your goal is to attract thousands of visitors to your blog, then you need to find out what thousands of people are searching for. Are they looking for home improvement ideas? Weight loss tips? Marriage advice? Cake recipes? Finding your niche requires research to help find the right topics your blog will cover. You would also wonder what to do after keyword research that will bring the broad topics that are most relevant to your website into focus and use them to generate a list of authentic words and phrases that your target customers are actually typing into search engines. Once you have identified the main keyword, you can start writing posts on it by targeting:

1. Long tail keywords
2. Low competition keywords

By working step by step, you will be able to rank for the higher competition keywords eventually and maintain those rankings. Always remember to include your keyword in your title, in the body of the content and in the H2 and H3 headings. Write naturally and try not to overstuff your keywords in the content. Search engines are smart enough to identify hacks. 

Structure and Layout

Posts that are designed to be easily readable help you increase engagement. All your posts must have an introduction, a body and a conclusion. These sections provide a very good structure and also improve readability. In the body section, try and provide good subheadings which helps the reader understand your content faster and more efficiently.

In addition to this, making the blog mobile friendly and making the loading time faster dramatically increases your chances of being found on google and increasing rankings

Technical factors

There are technical factors that contribute to the ranking of your blog post along with quality content. Start by making the URL structure must be keyword rich and also easily readable. You should also spend some time thinking of an appealing meta description. Lastly, always optimize your images by adding the file name of the keyword you want to target. For e.g. if you want to target the word “Happy”, make sure the image file you upload includes the word “Happy”.

Your links Matter

External and Internal links are a great way to make your blog SEO – friendly. External links include backlinks from other websites that point to your blog; giving relevance to your content. Internal linking is where you link pages within your website making it easier and faster to crawl your website. You can also link to previous blog posts which is a very good way for search engines and people to find all of your content. We must design the blog in such a way that content can be easily discovered by crawlers and human beings. So, take time to figure out how to present content in the best way. Lastly, always monitor your site to remove broken links as this can severely impact your rankings.

Non Textual Factors

By adding social sharing features and embedding various types of media, your blog post will start getting higher engagement leading to higher search rankings. Depending on your industry, you can make it easier for people to share on facebook, Instagram, twitter, email, Linkedin etc.

To stand apart from your competitors, you can also prepare for voice searches. A lot of people ask questions on google instead of typing it out. You must not lose the opportunity to cater to those voice searches. This is a great way to improve SEO rankings for your post.

We hope you are better prepared to start an SEO friendly blog post and keep growing traffic with these great tips. This is a long journey of trial and errors but by incorporating the above SEO tips, you will find yourself far ahead in the competition. Be patient and you will reap the benefits of being on page 1 of any search engine. Stay motivated and you will reach your goals. The key to a successful blog post is in careful planning and persistence. To find inspiration by successful people and their endeavours from around the world you can look here. 

Slow and steady wins the race in SEO.