11 Tips to Optimize SEO Friendly Blog and Bonus Tips
This post provides the best tips on writing SEO-friendly blog posts and a bonus tip for long-term strategy to rank well in the search engines.
Welcome to another seo friendly blog post on learning SEO like a pro!
This time, you'll learn tips to write an SEO-friendly blog post for the search engines. If your goals are to optimize your content structures, keep readers interested, and increase your ranking on search engines results. You are in the right place!
This post provides the best tips on writing SEO-friendly blog posts and a bonus tip for long-term strategy to rank well in the search engines.
If you are new to this blog, do not hesitate to look at our blog post “The Ultimate Beginner guide for SEO”, it is completely full of information and tips about SEO purposes, how it works and how to take the most advantage of it. I recommend starting from there.
Let's start. Take your time, write notes and enjoy the process in writing a better seo friendly blog posts!
Identify the target audience for your blog
The most important aspect when writing a blog post with an SEO strategy is to know who you want to engage. Identify the audience and develop a deep understanding of who is your audience and how to speak to them. Learning who your audience is what will keep you from wasting your time, and will give you an advantage in knowing which topics are popular within your audience. This process requires research for you create an optimized blog posts.
Follow these proven ways to find your audience for your seo friendly blog posts:
Perform keyword research using your primary keyword in a keyword research tool. This process will help you identify the search terms people are entering in the search engines that are relevant to your business.
Use social media to get more insights into your audience. For example, go on Quora and look at the questions that people are asking about your topic. These questions could be a perfect fit for subtopics in your new blog post.
Focus on what products they like to use, their interests, what are their concerns or frequent questions, and the trends within your audience.
Use the tool Pinterest keyword search and look at the suggested words at the top of the page.
Locate Forums of your niche
Forums are a common way to make a community within a niche, chat, share, ask, and answer relevant questions. Observe the exact topics your audience is talking about on the forum. Without a doubt, this is a great tool to find opportunities and prioritize your post topics.
Some forums are on Twitter, Telegram, and Google searching.
Do a Google search to find your competitor Blogs (Don’t try to copy! Be better, do better!).
Notice what they are doing to attract people. Ask yourself, is it working for them? Does the content is attractive? What would you do to improve it? Are they missing some relevant points or topics on the posts? Which are their top keywords phrases?
Read the comments of the most popular articles of your competitors. Reading the comments section can give you priceless information about what to do better, what topics they are interested in knowing more about, and pull out new ideas for to create a well optimized blog post.
As well, focus on your blog comments section to add more value and inspiration to your next blog posts.
Research your keywords
Now that you know your audience and identified some of the most relevant keywords within social media, forums, and competition blogs from the search engines. Take time to conduct your researching your keywords and recognize the ones with more value for your public.
REMEMBER: The keyword research helps search engines (like Google) find your blog and rank well. For that reason, you need to focus on having the best top keywords that match your audience.
There are three elements of Keywords research that Google and the other search engines pay lots of attention to when choosing the websites and which ones to rank top.
RELEVANCE – Your content will only rank if the keywords meet the actual searcher's needs.
AUTHORITY – Make your blog authoritative by enriching your site with quality content, promoting your content, and backlinking.
VOLUME – This considers the number of times the keyword chosen is searched every month. Choose keywords that have a high search volume.
Another tip for researching keywords is to look at the related search terms and brainstorm some keywords you already identify with phrases you think people type on Google. This tactic is a good foundation for blog seo.
Plan your content
To see true results from your blog seo, you need to have a plan for your blog content strategy. This can save you hours on wrong promotion strategies and writing about wrong topics that don’t fit your audience's needs.
If you are up to saving time, driving more traffic to your blog, and seeing more successful results. Follow these tips to plan your blog content:
1) Define your goal and the message you want your subscribers to receive.
If you have this point clear, the other steps will be easier to do. Find your “why?” Why you are writing a blog? Why do you want people to read your blog? Find your purpose, cause, or belief.
2) Create the structure of the blog post.
This means organizing the content using a table of content, categories, tags, bullet points, an introduction, main body, and conclusion. Also, is very important to use the relevant keywords throughout all the content to optimize your SEO strategy for users and search engines.
3) Increase the shareability of your content.
Having content that gets more shareable improves your blog seo and engagement. Focus on having great quality content, don’t copy and paste the text. Use short paragraphs, images, infographics, and white space around the text to make your blog post easier to read and comprehensive.
4) Use transition words and power words.
Both of them help search engines and audience drive engagement. In addition, power words are so persuasive that can make people be influenced.
5) No keyword stuffing your article.
Make sure that you do not do any keyword stuffing for your article. This keyword stuffing tactic gives a negative experience for the reader.
Write an effective blog post title and URL friendly
A good seo friendly blog posts will have a headline title that is vital for your article to get more users to click on your article. Involve your post title into SEO friendly by using the most relevant and strong keywords. Including the keywords at the beginning of the sentences of your title, besides it is a parameter that Google uses to rank websites, the audience chooses the ones more descriptive, and with the words, they are looking for.
A piece of advice that works for me is to leave the title at the end, once you have the quality content written, you create the blog structure, then sit down and brainstorm the title with the most popular keywords, play with the words, and phrases, use power words, and accurately describes the content of your blog post, make it engaging and interesting.
For the URL, make it simple. Use “- “to separate the words that are involved in the URL and remove the words that are not necessary to make a shorter and readable URL. The goal of having a great URL structure is to make visitors understand the content they’re about to see.
Optimize the length of your content
Your blog posts are competing with many other posts on the same topic in the search engine. Some can say that shorter posts lead to better results and more engagement, and some say that longer posts are better but can bored people. The truth is that the length can vary depending on the purpose of your blog post, who is the audience, and other factors of SEO.
No rule mentioned the perfect length of a seo friendly blog post. The most important is the value you provide to the blog. To succeed and not overwhelm the readers include a great structure, break down the content into categories, keep paragraphs to three sentences or four, use bullet points, and add headings and subheadings using the top keywords.
The length of the post can depend on its purpose. It can be for describing products and services (200-400 words) and blogs to share on social media (400-600 words). But if you’re into building an SEO blog, make your article digestive for Google or any other search engine by adding extra content, facts, and valuable information (1,500-2,500 words).
Here are some benefits of longer posts:
Longer blog posts can lead users to stay more time on the page. Having more content can improve your blog seo and help your better in google search.
More information has more social shares and backlinks.
Long seo friendly blog post can improve SEO performance.
Finally, put yourself in the shoes of your audience. What are they expecting to get from your post? Do they need a lot of background to understand the topic?
Add visuals to optimize SEO
Nowadays, having posts with just text doesn’t work well in ranking in the search engine. If you want to get in the search results then it is important to add media elements to the blog to make it interesting. You also want to create an article that is understandable, enhance the quality of content, also it helps the readers to retain the content information for a longer time, as well as images can help to increase traffic on social media and forums as they are shareable.
These are some visual content ideas that are effective and trending at this moment:
Animations and Gifs
Animations and Gifs are a simple way to tell a story or demonstrate a product to explain how it functions.
Infographics
The infographics help increase awareness and contribute to the site’s traffic, backlinks, and social media shares.
Videos
Videos are very effective for the visual content of blogs. You can use videos to explain how a product works or give all the information about the topic.
Comparisons and data-driven: charts, diagrams, and graphs.
Your audience may like and understand better the content of our blog via graphs or charts. If that’s the case, use data-driven visuals.
Quotes
Incorporate quotes from influencers, directors, CEO of successful brands, or anyone within your industry. Look to inspirational, powerful, and memorable quotes that could help extend your value and be shareable tools across websites and social media.
Design a link-building strategy
Link building is one of the most relevant factors for SEO and search engines to rank websites. To rank at the first-page search result, you need to have high-quality and authoritative sites linking to your website. This strategy can be via content marketing, email marketing, public relations, and tools that help backlink.
After deep research, I do for all my readers and audience. I find proven ways to build the best strategy to link building. Experiment with each of them and keep with the ones that work best for you and your business.
Let’s look at them:
Be a master at creating and distributing Infographic
As mentioned before, this can lead to earning quality links without effort.
Get active on Social Media
Nowadays, social media play a vital role in marketing. Become an active user by sharing new posts and creative ideas and previewing your blogs, images, and updates.
Be a Guest Blogging
Talk about your content, ideas, and authenticity on blogs that invite guests, podcasts, shows, or even be a guest on Instagram lives of an influencer with your same niche.
Internal Links
This can be an opportunity to develop a relationship between your new and old blog posts. Internal links makes your current posts show authority, and the audience would like to read more about the topic without stepping out of your website.
Include CTA (Call to Action)
The Call-to-action is an invitation for your audience to act. You choose with kind of action you want them to take. The benefits of CTAs will increase the opportunities for your audience to interact with your blog. The CTAs can be included in different formats and addressed in separate parts of your blog posts.
The ones I recommend the most are:
“Tweet this” links – This involves social media Twitter, and when a reader clicks on it, they give their opinion on the blog and promote the content.
Blog Subscription – At the end of your blog or one side, you can add a box where people can subscribe by email and receive alerts when there are new posts.
Comment section – Encourage your readers to share their thoughts on the article or ask them to question the current topic.
Download the blog as a PDF – The article can be helpful for work purposes, school homework, starting a blog, and many other purposes. Give readers the chance to download the post to take advantage of it and use it without WIFI connection.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO deals with what is behind the pages (the internal structure). This part includes checking that every link works perfectly, that there are no errors found, the page speed, that every Technical SEO is understandable, traceable, and indexable, and the formats and file sizes.
Technical SEO is the most complex strategy and delicate area for SEO. Technical SEO requires constant attention. If you are not very familiar with HTML and codes, I recommend having specialized professionals help.
Let other people read your blog before uploading it online
Let someone else read your blog post before uploading it to your blog. Try to choose someone inside your audience. Check if they understand the focus concept, and have seen relevant content related to the topic. Let them correct your grammatical errors if some term is not too understandable, and check if all links and visual data work correctly.
This will help you know if your blog post is attractive, easy to read, and that you are covering the relevant aspects of the topic, and certainly will make you feel more confident about your post.
Track your Blog SEO performance
Tracking your performance is helpful to understand how your blog is going and improve what is needed. Unlike other marketing channels and strategies, SEO does not work instantly. It can take to see considerable results from 6 to 12 months.
So, don’t give up! Keep working, being consistent and upgrading your SEO strategies, investing time in checking keywords upgrades and trends, and remember to track and analyze your performance.
That having been said, consider these metrics when tracking your results:
Organic Traffic
The number of visitors your site generates, and how many persons are clicking on your web pages. Also, can be seen as the most effective indicator of your overall SEO progress.
Average Visitors per Blog Post
This metric documents the visitor per blog post. As opposed to Organic traffic, this one analyzes the average views per blog not for the whole website.
Keywords Ranking
Keywords ranking shows your website ranking number, the competitive and relevant keywords. Keyword ranking can be improved and lead to discovering new ones and the most upgraded within your niche.
Click-Through Rate
It is the percentage of users who clicked on your website. This can be optimized when you upgrade your keyword ranking.
Time Spent on Page
If the user spends a lot of time, this means that the site and content satisfied their query and is a good indicator that the keywords work successfully and meet the visitor's expectations.
BONUS TIPS:
Keep your content up to date and update existing content.
To keep engaging your readers, you need to include fresh content on your new post and older posts by upgrading and repurposing the current information.
The purposes of updating your content are to:
Gain authority over time.
Improve the numbers of visitors and leads.
To rank on SERP (search engine results pages.
Works as an incentive for users to come back to your blog.
When the content is improved, remember to make noise to let users know you have fresh content. It can be via social media, forums, blog calendars, and search engine results pages.
Develop a Blog content calendar.
Remember the importance of having visual images on your blog. It works as a magnetism to attract more people, help you to plan and organize your topics, and is another way to use your top keywords.
This strategy can include social media updates, dates of your regular blog posts, and announcements. And to encourage more people to come back to the blog, try to do occasional events such as workshops, live sessions, invite guests or be a guest in another blog.
To conclude
Take a look at this quote from Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings and co-founder of Search Engine Marketing New England.
Using SEO is something you need to work on daily and be consistent. SEO is a strategy for long-term success. Don't give up! Results are going to come up!
Check the other blog posts about SEO optimizations and keep going deeper into the world of SEO. We hope to see you next time here!