5 Tips to Write SEO-Friendly Blog Posts
Writing SEO-friendly blog posts might seem like a huge challenge, something that needs to be left to the experts with technical knowledge. Left to those pale, sun-deprived beings permanently welded to their computers and communicating purely in code. However, there are a number of things you can do that can help your blog post get the visibility it deserves. This article will look at five things you can do to help you avoid some of the major pitfalls when writing content for your website.
Research Your Keywords
Before you sit down and start tapping away at your computer without a care in the world, it’s important to understand what your ideal customer is going to put into a Google search (other search engines are available) to find you. This means researching the best keywords and longtails to use (longtails are longer keyword phrases). There are plenty of tools to help you achieve this, including SemRush, Ahrefs and Google Keyword Planner. These keyword research tools are invaluable to help you build up relevant keyword lists. They also help you find out how much traffic each term gets. Some of these tools can also analyse your competitors’ websites to see what keywords they’re using and how effective they are. Not only that, they can help you identify gaps in your competitors’ keyword strategy. This is invaluable in helping you exploit valuable untapped keyphrases and stay ahead of the game.
Use Headlines Effectively
It doesn’t matter how eloquent you are as a writer, if it’s not structured in a way that your reader can engage with, it’s more than likely your prospective clients will click away from your blog post and find another site that will solve their problems. Most people when faced with a large block of text won’t read it. They will look at the headline and maybe scan the first couple of lines before losing interest. The trick is to use headlines strategically. Break up your text into bite-sized chunks that are easy to consume and start each section with a headline. This means that a reader can scan your whole article and know what you’re talking about immediately. As well as keeping the reader’s attention, this is also great for SEO, as you can use your sub-headlines for strategic keywords or longtails. Each blog post should have only one main headline (H1) and multiple sub-headlines (H2, H3, etc.). And make sure that each page has a different H1, otherwise, Google will get confused as to which page to rank for that keyword.
Get into the Habit of Internal Linking
Another important ranking factor for a website is how easy it is to navigate all the pages of your site. Internal linking can ensure that all your pages can easily be found. This is especially important for larger sites. It can also help new readers find older posts, which will keep them on your site for longer. Internal linking means highlighting a section of text in your blog post and adding a hyperlink to another web page that goes into more detail on that particular aspect. For example, for this article, if I mention SEO competitor analysis, I can highlight those words and link them to our previous article. It is also advisable to go back to older articles and add hyperlinks to your new blog posts to help them to be found quicker.
Add Alt Tags on Images and Videos
When Google looks at images, it only reads the alt text that’s attached to them. This is a piece of text that tells the search bots what that page is about. It also helps blind and partially-sighted people using a screen reader to know what’s happening in the image. Your alt text should describe what is happening in the photo using proper English sentences. This is also an opportunity to use keywords as part of your alt text.
Add Meta Descriptions to Your Blog Posts
A lot of blogs are posted without adding meta descriptions. These are really important for blog posts as they tell the search bots what the page is about. This is another opportunity to put the keywords in the meta description that you compiled from your research. When you search for anything on Google, this is the text that comes up below your title, as can be seen in the image below.
There’s a lot more that goes into optimising a webpage, but following these 5 tips to write SEO-friendly blog posts will give you a competitive edge and help your articles and blog posts be found more easily.
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