Do you write useful blog posts but still not get enough traffic to your blog? You are confused about how to rank your content and get organic reach for your content? If your answer is yes, then this article is for you.
The reason you are not getting enough organic traffic is your blog post is not ranking on the search engine. Missing SEO, an important step that is optimizing your article for search engines. Writing a perfect SEO-optimized blog post is a skill and if you master this skill, you can take your writing career to the next level.
Anybody can write an article but it takes special efforts to write SEO optimized blog posts.
In this article, I will be sharing a step-by-step process to write SEO-optimized blog posts that will be ranking in search engines. But before understanding how to write SEO-optimized content you must know 2 things.
- What is SEO?
- What is SEO Content Writing?
So let’s get started to learn a new skill.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is not as difficult as you think. If you understand the basic elements of Search Engine Optimized content, then you can easily write blog posts that search engines love.
According to Neil Patel, SEO which stands for search engine optimization is the art of ranking articles in the search engine. In other words, it is a process of optimizing your online content so that the search engine shows your content in the top searches for a particular keyword.
The whole optimization process revolves around specific keywords and this makes keyword research the main component of search engine optimization. This is the technique that you should master to get unpaid traffic from google. But before mastering the keyword research technique and making your content Search Engine friendly let me explain to you what is Search Engine Optimized content writing and what are the fundamentals to write web content.
What is SEO Content Writing?
SEO content writing is the process of ranking your content for relevant keywords that your target audience is searching for on Google and other search engines.
Now let me tell you the fundamentals of SEO Optimized Content:
- The content should be created around targeted keywords so that it becomes easy for search engines to understand what your article is about.
- It should be comprehensive and answers your target audience’s biggest questions better than your competitors.
- It should be structured and written in a way to keep your readers engaged with the content till the end.
- It should align with your target audience’s search intent.
Now, for example, your target keyword is “steps to write SEO optimized blog post,” then your content should answer your audience’s most common question on this topic and it should be more in-depth than what’s currently ranking for your target keyword.
Step by step guide to creating a perfect SEO optimized blog post for beginners.
Now that you understand the 2 basic things that are
- What is SEO?
- What is SEO content writing?
Let us now dive deeper into the specific step-by-step details of writing a perfect SEO-optimized blog post.
- Find relevant keywords for your blog
The foundation of a perfect SEO-optimized blog post is the smart keyword research that you should do. I know that doing keyword research is a bit tedious task but you cannot skip this step as keyword research is an essential part of every SEO strategy.
Before you finalize words that you think can be good keywords for your content, you need to focus on what kind of keywords your blog could rank for. You can also ask the following questions to yourself before deciding anything.
- What would I type in google to find an article like this one?
- What would my target audience type in google to find my article?
- What are the most common questions my target audience asks related to this topic?
These questions and their answers will ultimately help you in preparing a list of keywords that you can use in your blog post.
- How to select the right keywords?
Selecting the right keywords can be a little bit tricky. You need to find out keywords that have the highest potential to bring traffic to your blog post. But remember you have to search for keywords that have high search volume but low competition.
In other words, try to pick keywords with low competition but those keywords must have a large number of people looking for them. Also, remember to focus on long-tail keywords. For example, try to rank for “how to write SEO optimized blog post for beginners” instead of “SEO optimized blog post.”
- Keyword research tools
There are plenty of keyword research tools that can help you find the right keywords for your blog posts and can easily optimize the posts with them.
The most popular tool is google keyword planner, but to use this tool you need to have a google ads account. You can also use another free tool by Neil Patel that is UberSuggest.
- Understand Search Intent
Now that you know how to do keyword research use must understand the search intent behind a particular keyword.
What is search intent?
According to yoast.com, search intent defines the purpose behind an online search. When people search online they have a reason behind it. For Example, If someone searches for an “SEO optimized blog post”, what are they looking for steps to write SEO optimized articles, SEO optimization tools, or SEO content writing services?
Google has improved its algorithm over years to determine the audience’s search intent. And now google ranks content that aligns with audience search intent. If you miss out on this step then your article will not rank on google.
The easiest way to determine search intent is by searching your targeted keywords on Google and analyzing the top 10 search results as the structure of these top-ranking pages aligns with your targeted keyword.
- Write useful and long-form content
Creating SEO-friendly blog posts doesn’t mean that you can compromise on the quality of your content. You can’t just stuff your targeted keywords to rank your article.
As a blogger, your main goal should be to write quality, engaging, and value-given articles. This way your blog post will get a lot of social media shares and engagement that will up your ranking on Google.
However, you should focus on creating long-form content and use keywords efficiently throughout the blog post to get results. Long-form content will help search engine crawlers index plenty of keywords and understand what is the blog about.
- Using keywords at the right places
After doing comprehensive keyword research and understanding search intent the next step is to identify the areas of your blog post that are needed to be optimized.
- The headline
The headline of the blog post is the main part of the content as your readers interact with your headline first and then decide whether they have to read the article further or not.
Search engines also interact with the headline first and including a keyword in the blog headline is vital. This is the first step of actually optimizing your blog post.
- Subheadings
Subheadings are very important for your blog so you should use them wisely to break your articles into small chunks to increase readability for your users.
Don’t stuff your focus keywords in subheadings unnecessary otherwise google will think that you are doing keyword stuffing and will not rank your article.
- Introduction
Keep your introduction short and to the point. It should not be more than 150 to 170 words including your targeted keywords. Modern-day users do not like reading long and useless introductions.
You just need to explain what will users get from your content and then move to the main content.
- Conclusion
Include a valuable and crisp summary of your main content in the conclusion. Your conclusion should not be more than 200 words including your targeted keyword.
- The URL
Another important aspect of optimizing a blog for SEO is to add your targeted long-tail keyword to the URL.
Also, keep your URL short and crisp to provide a better user experience to your users and also to search engines.
- Meta Description
According to Yoast, the meta description is an HTML tag that you set for your page or post on a website. It is basically an additional text piece where users see to the point and a crisp summary of the entire blog post.
It is what users see on google search results. An optimized meta description should:
- Be short and should not contain more than 155 characters.
- Include target keywords.
- Be clear, descriptive, and click-worthy to the readers.
- Use Internal and External Links wisely
Internal linking is a great way to practice SEO and make your blog SEO optimized without getting into SEO technicalities.
Linking to other pages of your website will help your readers explore your website thus keeping them on your platform for a longer duration and increasing your audience retention rate.
Like internal linking, external linking also plays a role in enhancing your blog’s SEO.
You can include at least 4 to 5 outbound links in a 2000 word long content. But don’t go crazy and add an external link in every paragraph. Only add external links if they are useful for your audience.
- Optimize blog images for SEO
Images add more value to your content and make it appealing to your audience. But always remember if you are adding visuals to your blog then make them SEO optimized as well.
Now how to optimize images for SEO?
Let me tell you how you can optimize your images for SEO.
- Change image title and add your target keyword in the title
For Example, If your image title is “IMAG714” then replace it with “SEO friendly writing tips”. Changing the image title will only take few extra minutes.
- Don’t leave alt tags of images blank, add your keywords in the alt text.
- Reduce the size of the images. As uploading larger files while affects your site speed badly and google checks for site speed before ranking your blogs.
- Make your content mobile-friendly
Congratulations!
You have come to the last step of optimizing your content for SEO.
Now making your blog post-mobile-friendly is not only about the responsive website design of the page. A responsive design is a good start but it isn’t sufficient.
You need to think about how your article will display itself on mobile.
Firstly make sure that you use short sentences in your content and make proper use of subheadings.
This will give your content the best readability experience on mobile.
And this is the step-by-step guide to create a perfect SEO-optimized blog post.
Conclusion
If you’ve been pushing out long-form content without the kind of results you want, I believe this blog post will help you a lot.
Long-form content does work. But it works great when combined with solid SEO, as these 7 detailed steps show.
SEO doesn’t have to be a headache. I know there are many factors to take you off track, and I hope this detailed step-by-step SEO checklist helps.
Keep in mind that this isn’t a comprehensive list of everything you would like to do to get great SEO. It is simply a detailed checklist of all SEO basics to use when you’re writing and editing your blog posts.
Like I always say, SEO is a long-term strategy. Never expect super-quick results with SEO.
This article will help you get started with SEO content writing, but I also recommend looking more into optimizing your content for SEO to get a perfect SEO optimized blog post
After a few posts, you’ll be doing a lot of this SEO stuff without even worrying about it, and you’ll see the results as your website gets a better ranking and more traffic.
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