Writing blog posts requires skill. To keep your reader interested, you should think about the structure of your content and write it in a way that the reader understands and will share with others. You want to be able to improve your writing skills and rankings, so start here with some tips for creating an SEO-friendly blog post!
Before You Start: Do Keyword Research
At the same time, it is important to keep both writing for search terms and attracting an audience in mind. Ready-made blog posts that are filled with keywords hinder readability, and simply including more than the minimum number of relevant terms can be a signal to Google that you might be stuffing keywords.
This blog post provides tips for writing blog posts that target SEO and readability. These two goals should also go hand-in-hand as we think it is always beneficial to write in easy-to-understand language and get more visitors to your site.
Check out what searches your audience is looking up and research the most popular keywords. Write about those topics and use those keywords in your blog posts so you can dominate the search results.
The only thing left to do when you’ve done your keyword research is to write a blog post. Here are 9 tips that can help you here.
Writing Tips for Friendly Blog Posts
Above all, you should be writing good information in your blog post. Without specific parameters or strict requirements, entrepreneurs may just start writing whatever comes to their minds. When blogging, businesses should follow these rules so they can create quality blog posts.
1. Think Before You Write!
Every blog post has a message. For each content marketing blog post, think about what you’re trying to tell your readers. Decide on the focus of your blog post and what visitors you want at the end of the page. If you can’t answer these questions before writing your first draft, examine search engine results for inspiration.
2. Devise a Structure For Your Post
To write an article that loads quickly and will be ready for the keywords it includes, you need to include a solid structure. This means that every article should be comprised of the following:
- some sort of introduction (in which you introduce your topic);
- a body (in which the main message is written);
- a conclusion (in which you summarize the main ideas or draw a conclusion).
In a few sentences, you can write down what you want to say in the three sections. Now it’s time to create a structured, readable blog post.
3. Use Paragraphs and Headings
Everyone uses paragraphs, but some don’t use them well. Allow each sentence to follow the natural flow of word choice and try to keep each paragraph short with its own idea, focus, or subject. Make sentences more succinct if necessary by breaking them up into different paragraphs. If a paragraph can’t be summarized in one sentence and you need more sentences to explain the point, then that’s a sign that you need more than one paragraph.
Headings help your readers understand the structure of a section. They also help to cultivate their interests, as keywords used in subtitles might lead them to read about a specific topic. Using your keyword in every heading will make your text clunky and unnatural. In order to stay on-brand, use the header keywords sparingly, yet strategically throughout the text.
4. Use Transition Words
The words that you use strategically break up your text and help readers understand the relationship between each paragraph. For example, you can use signal words, like ‘first of all; ‘secondly’ and ‘finally’ to alert readers to the fact that there will be a conclusion with the following words: ‘to sum up or ‘in short’. Transition words are important for adding structure to your paragraphs because they help people read what needs to come next in their reading flow.
5. Use Related Keywords
Stuffing your article with overuse of your focus keyword makes it less attractive to read and can also hurt your rankings. Google is getting smarter and is getting tired of writers relying on their focus keywords in every other sentence. Instead, it wants to help write articles focusing on topics that people will love rather than only talking about the topic they care most about. One of the ways Google understands what you’re writing about is by recognizing synonyms and related terms that are related to your focus keyphrase. That’s why you should use them throughout your copy.
The easy part is coming up with synonyms. It’s harder to think of related keywords that are relevant to your keyword’s focus. That’s why we’ve added a new feature in our plugin that lets you find related keyphrases with the click of a button! This feature is powered by SEMrush and can be used in our free and Premium plugins. Use this feature!
6. Optimize The Length of Your Article
Remember that at least 300 words are required as well as a balanced word count. Make sure you don’t write long posts that are too much for potential visitors and remember to always use focus keywords in your text.
7. Link to Existing Content
If you have content identical to your new blog post, make sure to link the old posts to bring back traffic. Additionally, maintaining a meaningful structure on your site helps you rank better on Google because it makes it easier for people to find what they’re looking for and become more engaged with your site.
Internal linking helps your readers and search engine bots understand relationships between different content on your site and recommend relevant pages to link to. The internal linking tool can help you find the right pages on your site to link to by suggesting ideas.
8. Let Other People Read Your Post
If it is your first time writing about a topic that other people may not understand, let someone else in your team read what you have written and point out mistakes. Someone with more knowledge of that topic can also provide helpful suggestions for your writing.
9. Add Content Regularly
With a healthy blog, you can increase the frequency of Google’s unique content and posts on your website and this will benefit your SEO as well SEO Progress. Make sure you are posting relevant and high-quality content consistently to keep up with the constant updates demanded by search engines.
If you struggle to post on a regular basis, it might be a good idea to create an editorial calendar for your blog. Turning posts into specific activities on an editorial calendar ensures that they get done and done consistently. It’s also wise to update older posts from time to time so the content doesn’t lose its relevance.
10. Include Images and Videos
Images and videos are much more popular than those without. The takeaway is to include alt text, which is descriptive text attached to your media. If you use this, you are also increasing your chances of appearing in image and video searches.
Conclusion
The days when keyword stuffing and spammy SEO tricks were enough to rank a website in search engines are now long gone. It’s more important than ever to focus on creating quality content. More good content will lead to greater visibility, more readers, shares, tweets, and returning visitors to your site. But you need to make sure that the blog post is ready for publication! Take a look at this checklist for your blog post before you submit it to publish. You can also optimize your blog for local SEO by adding local keywords and describing your blog post in terms of local topics.