17 Aug 10 Tips for Creating SEO Friendly Blog Posts
Creating SEO-friendly blog posts will increase your exposure and save you time. While creating new content is an important part of keeping your visitors engaged and improving your SEO and rankings, oftentimes people just post content for the sake of posting content (even duplicate content, which is a terrible SEO mistake). You could post an article every day but if it’s not optimized or valuable engaging content it’s not going to help you much. Below I’ve laid out 10 tips to help you get the most out of your content by creating SEO-friendly blog posts. If you’re posting 2 or 3 really good articles every month, there is no need to have 5,000 blog posts a year.
1. Pick a topic that your readers will find interesting, valuable, engaging, and maybe even controversial.
If you’re writing about the same old topics everyone else is writing about, you’re unlikely to drive much interest or traffic to your blog posts. If you know your audience (and you should), try to think about a topic they would find useful or interesting. For example, if you run a fitness website maybe there are some new technologies or trends in the industry or even a new controversial training technique. If you’re running a local blog focus on local trends or topics that are in the news and have people talking. Be sure to check out these local SEO tips as well. These types of topics are much more likely to get people to read your post and either comment on it or share it with their friends.
2. Do some keyword research
SEO is moving more toward just creating awesome content, but keywords are still important. It is in fact how Google knows what your article is actually about. Figure out what you would search for if you were looking for the information in your article, and try to include that phrase in your title, URL, metadata, headings, and in about 1-2% of your article content.
3. Come up with an irresistible title
After you have the topic locked down, the next step is picking a solid title for your article. This is extremely important because even if you have a great topic that your audience will love and your article is well-written if you have a boring title people are unlikely to click on it to read more. Pick a title that will immediately grab the attention of your reader, and don’t make it too long. HubSpot has an excellent article on how to create an excellent blog title.
4. After you pick a topic, do some research on it!
After you spend some time finding that ideal topic for your audience, make sure you research it thoroughly. Having a great topic is a phenomenal start, but it won’t do you much good if you’re article is misinformed and poorly written. You may get some good traffic if you have a good title, but after people read the article they won’t bother to comment on it or share if it’s poorly written.
5. Create a structure for your SEO friendly blog posts
While this is more of a general writing tip than just SEO, make sure your article has a clear structure and flow. Your blog posts should always have an introduction, a body, and a conclusion.
6. Use headings and paragraphs
If your article is going to have multiple sections or paragraphs make sure you use headings to preview which section will be about. This not only helps your audience know what they are about to be reading, but it also creates more whitespace and helps separate the text. If I wrote this blog post with no headings and just one long paragraph of text, no one would bother reading it.
7. Optimize your article length
This one is kind of a balancing act. On the one hand, Google generally prefers longer articles and you’re more likely to rank for long-tail keywords with a longer article. On the other hand, people prefer shorter articles as they don’t want to sit down and read a blog post for 30 minutes. I’ve found that around 800 words is typically a good length.
8. Link to previous and external content
Posting a well-thought-out article on an engaging topic is phenomenal, but if you’re going to take the time to sit down and write this great article, why not have it help some of your other pages as well? Linking to previous content in a blog post is a great way to keep people engaged and on your website longer. Linking to previous or external content on other websites will also help with your link structure, authority, and Google ranking.
9. Always include an image or video in your blog posts
This is so easy to do, but it’s often skipped over. Having a featured image, video, infographic, or another type of media in your post will help draw the reader’s eye to click on your post.
10. Share and encourage others to share
Social signals are becoming a bigger factor in rankings and authority, so after you post your new article be sure to share it on all of your social sites and encourage your audience to share it as well. A couple of easy ways to encourage your audience to share your post is to make it easy for them (include the share buttons right underneath the article), and interact and engage with your audience. If someone gives you a positive comment on your article or Facebook post comment back, even if it’s just to say thanks.
Wrap up for SEO friendly blog posts
If you follow these simple tips for creating SEO-friendly blog posts you’ll spend much less time creating content in the long run. A few high-quality articles are much more valuable than posting an article every day that no one will see. There are other things you can do as well to make sure your blog or article will rank, but following these 10 tips is a very good start.