If you write, you know how much time and effort goes into publishing a blog. It goes without saying that you want your hard work to be viewed.
Unfortunately, simply expressing an interesting idea on a blog usually isn’t enough to push your post to the top of the Google search results. This is where SEO (Search Engine Optimization) comes in.
There are many steps you can take to make your blog SEO-friendly, however, just like any other skill, SEO takes time and practice to master. Luckily, I’ve put together a 10-step guide to get you started.
Here are 10-steps you can take to make your blog SEO-friendly:
- Create valuable content
- Understand the basics of writing
- Choose good keyword/s to optimize for
- Choose a good title
- Write your own meta description
- Use your keyword/s in the first 100 words
- Optimize your blog and paragraph length
- Wrap your headings
- Utilize links
- Optimize images
Create Valuable Content
While optimizing all the technical parts of your blog will improve your Google search rankings, the most fundamental part of SEO is creating content of value. I like to approach this in 3 steps:
- Choose the topic
- Choose the goal
- Identify how to provide value to the reader
For example, the topic of this blog is SEO. The goal is to bring more publicity to my website and to appeal to potential hiring managers. I’m providing value to the reader by giving a step-by-step guide on how to optimize their blogs.
After you complete this step, it’s time to move on to the actual writing.
Understand the basics of writing.
There are a million different ways to improve your writing. If you’re new to writing blogs, Hubspot is a great place to start learning. Rather than laying out the entire process of blogging in this post, I’ve compiled my top 3 tips on how to improve your writing from the famous writer Gary Provost.
Tip 1: Steal
Many people are focused on creating original content. Well, turns out there are virtually no original ideas. Taking information from multiple sources here and there and then adding it to your own content is a great way to create comprehensive writing as well as improve your efficiency.
Remember, don’t plagiarize other people’s work. Simply learn from them and implement what you learned in your writing.
“If you steal from one writer, it’s called plagiarism, but if you steal from several, it’s called research.”
– Gary Provost
Tip 2: Write Music
Sentence length can make a huge difference in how engaging your writing is. This is summed up in a quote by Provost.
Tip 3: Avoid Cliches
Sometimes, it can be tempting to default to cliches while writing. Here’s what Provost has to say about it:
“Clichés are a dime a dozen. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. They’ve been used once too often. They’ve outlived their usefulness. Their familiarity breeds contempt. They make the writer look as dumb as a doornail, and they cause the reader to sleep like a log. So be sly as a fox. Avoid clichés like the plague. If you start to use one, drop it like a hot potato. Instead, be smart as a whip. Write something that is fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack. Better safe than sorry.” – Gary Provost
How to Choose good Keywords to Optimize for
As a general rule, you want to choose the highest-ranking keyword that you can reasonably compete for based on your competition, and your ability to produce quality content.
Take a look at some competing blogs. What keywords are they optimizing for? Are you able to create a more comprehensive and authoritative post than them?
If you are able to exceed the quality of your competition, optimizing for the same keywords is a viable strategy. If not, choose more specific keywords, aka long-tail keywords.
SEO Keyword Tools
One of the most popular keyword search tools is Semrush.
While this tool is a bit costly, it provides great features such as:
- Uncovering national/local keywords
- Analyzing any domain’s backlink profile
- Running SEO audits
- Tracking SERP positions
A great free alternative is keyword.io.
This tool is great for finding long-tail keywords and it pulls its results from many different search engines.
If these are not what you’re looking for, you can find a more comprehensive list on Backlinko.
How to Choose a Good Title
There are three main steps to creating a good title:
- Front-load your title
- Add title tag modifiers
- Keep it simple
Front-loading your title is the practice of putting the target keyword near the front of the title. If you search for a term, chances are the top results are going to have front-loaded titles.
Like this.
In a simple search for the term “bitcoin”, the top three organic results have the term “bitcoin” at the front of the title.
The second step is to add a modifier to your title. In SEO, modifiers are words like “best”, “offers”, “buy”, “guide” and “reviews”. This is effective because users naturally use modifiers in Google searches.
For example, this blog is optimized for the term “Writing SEO Friendly Blogs”. I added the modifier “10-Step Guide”.
The third step is to keep it short and simple. Research from Hubspot shows that titles with 11-14 characters perform the best.
If your title is too long, it will get cut off like this:
If you’re having trouble coming up with a title on your own, a great tool to use is Answer The Public.
This tool generates titles based on common searches, plus it’s free!
Write Your Own Meta Description
A meta description is a tag that is attached to a post or page.
Like this.
When people are scrolling through Google search results, the meta description exists to convince the user to click the link. In fact, a statement from Google’s SEO Starter Guide states that:
“Adding description meta tags to each of your pages is always a good practice”
If WordPress is your main platform, AISEO (All-in-One SEO) is a great tool that allows you to create custom meta descriptions along with many other SEO-related features.
Use the Keyword in the First 100 Words
Using keywords at the beginning of your blog is optimal for your Google search rankings. Think about it. It would be strange if I didn’t use the term “SEO” in this post until the last paragraph.
For example, the first section of this post is 98 characters:
“If you write, you know how much time and effort goes into publishing a blog. It goes without saying that you want your hard work to be viewed.
Unfortunately, simply expressing an interesting idea on a blog usually isn’t enough to push your post to the top of the Google search results. This is where SEO (Search Engine Optimization) comes in.
There are many steps you can take to make your blog SEO friendly, however, just like any other skill, SEO takes time and practice to master. Luckily, I’ve put together a 10-step guide to get you started.”
Including keywords near the beginning helps Google recognize the topic of the post.
Optimize Blog/Paragraph Length
Longer posts tend to perform better. This is not necessarily because of the word count. In most cases, a longer blog correlates with a thorough, authoritative post that includes lots of good graphics and links.
If you search for any term and read through the top pages, you will find that they are extremely in-depth and detailed. The key is to focus on the quality of your content and increase the length by including more relevant and useful information.
When it comes to paragraph length, keep it short. Most people don’t do google searches to read through walls of text. Remember, a large part of SEO is simply the user experience.
Wrap your Headings
Wrapping your title in the H1 tag is a great way to let Google know the topic of your page. It also helps to include subheadings wrapped in the H2 tag. While this won’t make a massive difference, it will help.
This is an example of wrapping headings and subheadings from Google’s SEO Starter Guide.
Heading:
Subheading:
Utilize Outbound Links
An outbound link is a link from your post to another website. While they are not the number one priority for SEO, they help Google identify the subject of your blog and they help establish it as an in-depth and authoritative post.
“Does the content present information in a way that makes you want to trust it, such as clear sourcing, evidence of the expertise involved, background about the author or the site that publishes it, such as through links to an author page or a site’s About page?”
The efficacy of outbound links is a commonly debated topic, however, according to a study from Reboot Online:
“Outgoing relevant links to authoritative sites are considered in the algorithms and do have a positive impact on rankings.”
Optimize Images
Pictures, infographics, and other forms of media are a great way to keep the reader engaged. You can take a couple of steps to optimize images in your post.
- Compress your images
- Use keywords in the file name
High-definition images can negatively impact your page’s loading speed and ultimately result in a worse user experience. A simple fix is to compress any large images. Some sites such as WordPress automatically compress images, however, if the platform you are using doesn’t have this feature, a great file compressing tool is Jpeg.io.
Giving your images a meaningful file name, preferably with a keyword included, gives search engines more context. When renaming files, use the keyword at the beginning of the name and separate the words with hyphens.
Like this.
Conclusion
So now you know how to write content that both users and search engines will enjoy. Before publishing your content, take some time to do some research and planning. Implement these SEO strategies wherever you can.
This is a lot of information to take in, but remember that SEO is a skill that takes time to develop. Keep practicing and your traffic will eventually increase.
Note: This article was written as a part of my larger project of Mastering SEO in 30 Days. Check out my progress as well as what I created.