Even if you are the strongest writer in the blogosphere, your blog posts might be missing out on major views, shares, and backlinks if they are not SEO-friendly. This blog post discusses basics on how to write an SEO-friendly blog post. If you are interested in learning more generally about SEO, see here, here, and here. Before diving in, I want to emphasize that a blog post’s content value and readability should never be forsaken for SEO. Readability and SEO are two pillars that search engines consider when providing search results for their consumers.
SEO Blog Writing: Focus Keywords
When writing a blog, the first question to come to mind is usually, “What do I want to write about?” This question is also the first step to SEO blog writing. In SEO terms, this question sounds more like, “What is my focus keyword?” For those of you that don’t know, a focus keyword is essentially what you want your audience to type into a search engine to find your article and what you want your page to rank for. So, since I’m writing a blog post on SEO blog writing, my keyword is “SEO blog writing.” Simple, right?
There are a couple things to consider when selecting your keyword: Is this keyword present elsewhere on my website? How frequently can I eloquently use my keyword in my text? How competitive is my keyword? If you are struggling to select a keyword, check out this blog post on keyword research.
As a rule of thumb, your focus keyword should show up in 1-2% of your text. Additionally, you want to make sure your focus keyword is placed in the following sections of your blog post:
- Title – within the first 65 characters
- Headers – Including headings and sub-headings in your blogs is important for both the structure and organization of a blog but also SEO blog writing. You should stick to having one main heading, which can be your title, and then use sub-headings for more specific sections of your article. Because your headings and sub-headings should contain your focus keyword(s), you’ll boost your SEO rank
- Body – be sure you are not sacrificing the eloquence of your writing by keyword stuffing, which there is a penalty for
- URL
- Meta Description – a meta description should always be included with anything you publish on the internet, as it is the one of the first items your audience will see
SEO Blog Writing: Images, Inbound Links, and Mobile Responsiveness
While copy and structure is crucial for SEO blog writing, images, whether your blog is mobile responsive, and internal backlinking are features that cannot be overlooked.
Including relevant images in your blog will not only improve the aesthetic, but will also improve your SEO. Specifically, be sure to fill out your images ALT Text when posting. Because search engines cannot “see” images like humans, they rely on ALT Text for a description of the image. See this HubSpot article if you want to learn more about how to optimize your blog images.
Last year, Google revealed that most people use the Google search engine on their mobile device over their desktop[1]. Additionally, Google displays mobile-friendly results first on a mobile device. In this day and age, if your blog/website is not mobile responsive, it will negatively impact your SEO.
Backlinks significantly help the credibility of your website, which helps your SEO. While other sites backlinking to your content may seem out of your control, backlinking to your previous blog posts in new content is a great way to get your audience to dig deeper into your website.
SEO Blog Writing: Conclusion
If you want to organically bring more readers to your blog, correct SEO blog writing is crucial. By following the direction provided in this blog post, you have taken the first steps to creating a search engine optimized piece of content. Yet there is plenty more to do; search engine optimization is not a static practice. There are many more ways to make your content more relevant and visible, and search engines like Google are constantly tweaking the rules of SEO. To stay on top of current SEO best practice and other marketing best practices, be sure to check out TribalVision’s weekly blog.
To read more about the importance of blogging and SEO, see TribalVision’s previous blog posts here, here, and here.
1 http://searchengineland.com/its-official-google-says-more-searches-now-on-mobile-than-on-desktop-220369