How to write blog post for SEO optimization
A high-quality SEO blog post can do wonders for your rank on the Google search result page by creating content for more keywords, frequent indexing, using internal links, and getting backlinks. That being said, writing one can be quite difficult. To simplify let’s dive into what does SEO optimization even mean?
In simple terms, “search engine optimization” is the process of improving your site to increase its visibility when people search different keywords on search engines. The more visibility your pages have in search results when a certain keyword is searched for, the more likely you are to gain more visitors to your website. Thus for writing an SEO blog post is crucial to do keyword research.
Identify your target audience
No matter what industry your blog targets, you’ll want to find and target the primary audience that will be reading your content. Understanding who your audience is, what problems they might have, what troubles them, and how your blog can help them will help you get them to do what you want them to do once they click on your blog post.
Do your keyword research
Now that you’ve selected your target audience, it’s time to find out what content your readers want to consume. Thus, you should properly conduct your keyword research.
Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing search terms that your target audience uses while researching search engines with the goal of using the keywords of those search terms for search engine optimization. Keyword research can uncover queries to target, the popularity of these queries, their ranking difficulty, and much more.
To start keyword research, think about the topics you want to rank for on SERPs (search engine results pages). After you come up with about 5–10 topics you believe are most important to promote your business, use them to come up with specific keywords. The topics you come up with could be like this:
- “Getting started with CSS”
- “Learn HTML 5 the right way”
- “HTTP protocol, and why you should study it”
- “How to learn web design”
- “Start your first WordPress site”
Now that you have a few topic buckets you want to focus on, it’s time to identify some keywords that will be part of the content of your topics. To do so, think of all the important words your target audience uses while searching for specific topics. Those words will help you rank in the SERPs (search engine results pages) because your target customer is probably searching with those specific words.
For example, I decided to find keywords for my topic, “Getting Started with CSS.” After brainstorming keyword ideas, I came up with phrases people might use when researching my topic:
- What is CSS
- How to color text using CSS
- Which software is best for CSS
- CSS padding
- How to learn CSS
After you come up with your phrases, narrow them down to the most important ones and use them in your blog post.
One more way to conduct your research is to find out which keywords your website is already being found for. To do this, use website analytics software like Google Analytics. Data-drill into your website’s traffic data and look through your organic search queries to identify search terms people are using to arrive at your site.
Also, you could use keyword research and SEO tools that can help you come up with more keyword ideas based on exact match keywords and phrase match keywords based on the ideas you’ve come up with to this point. Some of the most popular ones include:
- Semrush
- Soovle
- SECockpit
- Google Search Console
- Google Keyword Planner
- Jaaxy
- KeywordTool.io.
- QuestionDB
- AnwserThePublic
- Ubersuggest
Write Clever Headers
Headers help Google’s web crawlers understand your blog post and the sections within it. For that reason, you want to structure your blog post into subtopics and divide each subtopic with an “H” tag. Starting from H1, which is going to be the headline of your blog post, to headers H2, H3, H4, etc. The tag of every new title will be one number larger than the one before. Also, your subheaders should reflect the content of the paragraph and include keywords.
Use keywords in the meta descriptions
If you never cared about the text in the meta descriptions on your sites, you should start right away. Google crawls meta descriptions to determine search rankings. Thus, they are crucial for ranking higher on SERP (search engine result pages) and making you visible when your target audience searches for topics that your site covers.
Internal linking
Internal linking is the process of hyperlinking to other pages on your website. Internal linking is one of the SEO basics which is used to get web crawlers understand what pages are the most important, next important, and least important on your website.
Compress images for faster load speed
If your blog loads as quickly as possible, Google will award you since its algorithm will detect loading speed as a part of the user experience. For quick loading time, it is best to avoid images that are large. As a result, you should use background images that are 1500 to 2500 pixels wide and avoid using images that are larger than 800 pixels wide.
Incorporate link building
Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to pages on your website. Such links are also called backlinks, and the more high-quality backlinks pages on your site have, the higher it can rank. For more guidelines, visit this article.
Conclusion
Creating an SEO-optimized blog post isn’t the easiest task, but surely it can be done by experimenting, learning, and writing about topics that will mean a lot to the audience that it targets. When starting a blog writing adventure, don’t forget to take your time, don’t rush it, don’t be afraid of it, don’t overdo it, and stress how good the results will be. Find joy in it, explore, and have fun, because in the end you will always get a good result if you incorporate some of the strategies listed in this blog post.
