In today’s online world, it’s important that you have various strategies in place to boost your viewership – the more views you get, the more sales you are likely to bring in, which means more revenue and, most importantly, profit. But, in a market which is constantly growing, with more websites than ever, offering the solution you may offer, getting seen has become a lot harder.
In order to be seen, you need to be smart and implement strategies which you know will help you get seen, and a big part of that is writing SEO friendly blog posts. By writing engaging blog posts which are also based on SEO best practices, you increase the likelihood of Google picking them up and pushing you up the rankings to number one, which is what we all aim for when writing a piece.
To write the best SEO blog posts, there are various things you need to consider. You should be optimizing it for readability – you can check my readability score to confirm this. Alongside this, you should be using headers correctly, ensure you do keyword analysis and use internal & external links. Using images and updating your content regularly is also something you should have in the back of your mind when making SEO blog post improvements.
To help get you started, below is a brief guide to writing the best SEO blog posts. Keep on reading for some tips and tricks to improve the content you are publishing on your site.
Start with keyword planning
A good place to start is doing some keyword planning. Keywords are ranked differently, and depending on which ones you target, you either give yourself a good chance of success or a bad chance. What you should be doing is writing posts based on easy keyword difficulties; this way, you are likely to rank for them.
For example, if you write about Man United, the difficulty is going to be a lot more difficult than if you write for a local team, such as Cambridge United. There are many online tools you can use to see the difficulty of keywords; just find the ones that work best for you.
Optimise for readability
Once you’ve chosen your keywords, the next step is to make sure your content is easy to read and understand. All your articles should score highly on the readability test, as this means your readers won’t have any trouble understanding what you have been writing about – Google ranks user experience, and the difficulty of an article to read factors into this. Try to use short sentences, break up your content with headers, use clear & simple language and include images.
Use images
Talking about using images, this is important for SEO, but when using them, you need to ensure you are doing it correctly. Your images shouldn’t be too large in file size (as this slows down the website), they should be correctly labelled, using ALT text, and nice file names, as well as being the correct file type. JPG is used a lot, but recently, a lot of people are turning to WebP. You can use PNG, but these tend to be bigger in size as they aren’t compressed.
Using the correct headers
Using proper headers (such as H1, H2, H3) is essential for both SEO and user experience. Headers help structure your copywriting and ensure your blog posts are consistent and put together in a logical way – this helps improve the readability of your article.
For example, you should have the H1 as the title “Top football teams in England”, then the H2 could be the teams “Man United”, “Chelsea”, “Liverpool”, etc. The headers are read by Google, helping it understand what your article is about and the relevance of your article for your site. Just be wary to get your headers correct, as badly put together headers can cause SEO issues – not including H1 and skipping H2S and using H3S as an example.
Update your content
Something that Google likes a lot is updated content. Google knows when your piece was last updated and will take this into account when it ranks your piece. As you can imagine, the last thing Google wants is an old piece ranking number one, as this could be incorrect and feature old content, such as a restaurant article written four years ago, suggesting places which are now closed.
Regularly updating your blog content doesn’t just please Google – it builds trust with your audience, positions you as an expert, and keeps your site relevant and competitive.
External and internal links
Finally, external and internal links are essential. Every article you write should include internal links to other relevant content you have created. This not only improves usability but also sends important signals to Google about the relevance and interconnectedness of your content. Additionally, you should focus on building external links by encouraging other reputable websites to link to your articles. External links from credible sources demonstrate to Google that your content is trustworthy and authoritative, which can significantly boost your search rankings.
When you are trying to get links to your site, always check the reputation of the sites you would like to link from. Ensure they are reputable, relevant to your niche, and have good domain authority. Avoid linking from spammy or low-quality websites, as this can negatively impact your SEO. Instead, focus on building relationships with trustworthy sites that can provide valuable, high-quality backlinks to boost your site’s credibility and search rankings.
As you can see, there is plenty you can do to ensure your blog posts have the best chances of ranking number one on Google. The more posts you publish following the best practices, the more likely you are to be seen.
What tips would you recommend to someone trying to improve the SEO of their blog posts? Which of the above tips do you think makes the biggest difference? Is there anything missing in our guide that you think we should be adding? Let us know in the comment box below. We look forward to hearing from you.
