Making your blog posts SEO-friendly is a great way to get your web pages to rank higher in users’ search engine results. This helps boost traffic on your website and reduces the need to invest in advertising to attract new readers.

In this article, we’ll go over some important tips you should keep in mind when creating an SEO-friendly blog post.

#1. Focus on your headings

Headings play an important role in giving your article proper structure by dividing it into multiple sections. Since most readers quickly skip through your blog posts, headings can help them quickly find what they are looking for in your article.

This is why headings and subheadings should accurately represent the topics you’re covering in your blog post. You can use key phrases in headings as a way to attract readers looking for answers. As a result, you boost SEO on your website and there’s a higher chance for your blog post to show up in users’ SERPs. This way, you can optimize your blog posts for your target audience and rank your web pages higher in SERPs.

#2. Optimize your content for humans

It’s important to understand that humans (not robots) search for solutions using the search bar. This means you need to optimize your content to better answer users’ questions instead of solely focusing on adding keywords or using headings intelligently. You need to write high-quality blog posts to enhance and to rank your blog posts better in SERPs.

A great way to do that is by creating organized blog posts that have proper headings, subsections, visual aids, and infographics to help readers better understand the topic and enhance user experience.

#3. Use alt text for images on your website

Alt text is used to describe and identify what’s happening in an image. It helps visually impaired people and Google understand why the image is present in your blog post. As a result, this can boost your web page’s ranking in search engine results.

For instance, if your blog post contains an image of a photography drone, you can add “Virtual drone taking aerial shots of London” using the alt text. This would describe what’s happening in the image perfectly and can help link relevant search results to your blog post.

#4. Research keywords

If you want your web pages to rank higher in SERPs, you will need to research search queries related to your industry. This simply tells you what solutions your audience is looking for and how your content can be optimized to answer their questions. To do this, you can use a keyword research tool. This gives you an overview of what users in your industry are searching for and how popular those keywords are.

You also need to identify market trends and optimize your site’s content accordingly. This helps you figure out what’s in demand right now and what’s slowly declining. A popular option for most businesses is using Google Trends to identify market trends in their industry.

Proper keyword research is important to ensure that your content strategy is based on the right keywords. This way, you’re not working on implementing keywords that are slowly going out of trend.

#5. Optimize blog posts for featured snippets

Featured snippets are displayed on Google’s search engine results as a direct answer to search engine queries.

For instance, if you search “How to take a screenshot in Google Chrome”, it will display a featured snippet showing you how to do this exactly.

You can optimize your content by including a part of the question in your content, this helps your content become the more “direct” answer to most users’ questions. For example, if a user searches “best website builders for photography enthusiasts”, they will see your blog post of the rundown of all the best website builders.

Ideally, you want to choose a keyword and then “earn” the featured snippet for it. This can be done by optimizing your content by including definitions to questions that are no longer than 40-60 words.

There are many types of rich snippets including reviews, events, recipes, products, software applications, videos, and articles. A great way to implement rich snippets on your website is by using the Schema – All In One Schema Rich Snippets plugin.

#6. Avoid keyword stuffing

While adding keywords to parts of your content is good for SEO, overdoing it by stuffing keywords in your content can have the opposite effect on SEO and user experience. Instead, you should be focusing on two or three high-priority keywords when creating SEO-friendly blog posts.

Keywords stuffing not only results in a poor reading experience but also negatively impacts Google’s search engine result ranking. Google may identify keyword stuffing as a failure to meet all requirements and can rank your blog posts lower in SERPs.

#7. Include high-authority website links in your content

Other than internal linking on your blog posts, you can also do external linking to enhance SEO on your blog posts. This offers readers additional resources to further expand their knowledge about the topic and helps improve the overall reading experience. In addition to this, if your blog posts are backed by statistics, there’s a better chance of ranking higher in SERPs.

It’s also a great way to gain trust from your readers as people are more likely to be convinced by looking at statistics and links to other high-authority pages. This shows them that you have done your research properly. As a result, more readers will trust you and your website which helps improve customer retention and attract new site visitors.

#8. Publish content on a regular basis

Creating and publishing high-quality content every day is important to keep site visitors engaged on your website. It’s also important because it tells Google that your website is updated regularly.

But this doesn’t mean you have to create sub-par content just for the sake of posting every day. You need to create unique, high-quality content according to users’ search engine queries. As a result, it can help boost SEO and rank your web pages higher in SERPs.

#9. Optimize blog -post length

When creating SEO-friendly blog posts, you need to consider that there are all types of readers who visit and read your articles. Some readers might prefer longer articles, while others are just looking for a quick, short read.

It’s important to mention that Google likes long-form articles. But this doesn’t mean you should get carried away with keyword stuffing. Most users will leave your blog post if it’s too long and difficult to read.

Blog posts should contain at least 300 to 500 words with a properly structured article. Ideally, you want to aim for the 1,000 to 1,500 words mark since this is the bare minimum for covering a topic thoroughly. This length of blog posts is ideal for all types of readers as it doesn’t confuse the reader with too many words but also explains the topic in full detail. Readers can also skim through blog posts, looking for the headings that are most relevant to their query.

#10. Use keywords in meta descriptions

It’s not only important to include meta descriptions for your blog posts but you should also be adding keywords to it. This helps people scan search engine results and quickly find the most relevant blog post.

But you might be wondering: what exactly are meta descriptions? Meta descriptions are the one to three lines that show up below the title of a search engine result.

The meta descriptions give users an idea of what to expect when they click on the search engine result. Ideally, you want to make sure your meta descriptions are short and sweet. You should also include one to two keywords and create a truly unique meta description. This gives your web pages a better chance to stand out from competitors.

If you’re having a hard time writing blog posts, you wouldn’t be the only one. Why not hire a content writer to produce SEO-friendly blog posts for you?

Conclusion

Creating SEO-friendly blog posts can be intimidating at first, especially if you don’t know where to start. Let’s recap some of the most important tips to keep in mind when creating your next SEO-friendly blog post:

  • Include high-priority keywords or phrases in your blog post’s headings, subheadings, and meta descriptions. But it’s important to remember not to stuff keywords in your content as it can negatively impact user experience.
  • You also want to follow a strict content strategy. This means you need to publish fresh content every day in order to boost your web pages ranking in SERPs. However, this doesn’t mean you start publishing low-quality content just to meet Google’s search engine ranking standard.
  • Other than optimizing content for search engines, you need to consider optimizing it for humans. This means you can add alt text to images, optimize your blog posts for featured snippets, and include high-priority website links in your content.

Do you know any other great tips for creating SEO-friendly blog posts? Let us know in the comments box below.