As with any writing, creating blog posts takes skills – and more than ever, it’s crucial to make them appealing.
If readers understand and find valuable information in your article, it’s likely that they’re much more inclined to share it and in return, increase your rankings. So, if you want to appear on the first page of search engine results, you should work on improving your writing skills, SEO-wise.
In this post, you’ll find actionable blog SEO tips that can help improve your SEO rankings. These tips will reveal some effective ways on how you can write SEO-friendly blog posts that appeal to both readers and search engines.
But, first, we discuss why blogs matter to SEO.
How Does Blogging Help with SEO?
Blogging is one SEO strategy that helps position your website as a relevant answer to a search query. It uses a variety of on-page SEO tactics each designed to give you more opportunities to attract more readers and potential customers to your website.
When you optimise your blog posts, along with the rest of your web pages, you’re making your website more visible to users searching for keywords associated with your products or services. Hence, the first step to writing SEO-friendly blog posts is doing your keyword research.
How to Write an SEO-Friendly Blog Post
Step 1: Keyword Research
These days when the best SEO practices are about relevance and intent, you have to select keywords that are actually related to your products or services—and for this matter, keyword research is essential as it will help you find keywords that your target audience would use if they’re researching about the topic you plan to discuss.
Identify a primary keyword. To start, you have to choose a keyword that is closely related to your blog topic. An effective keyword is a word or a phrase that’s frequently used in searches and at the same time, has a low competition rate.
Focus on long-tail keywords. As a rule of thumb, focus on long-tail keywords or those keywords that consist of four or more words per set. These keywords tend to have a lower search volume, but they do have a remarkable possibility to rank you higher on SERPS.
Avoid keyword stuffing. Another thing to keep in mind is to never overstuff your blog post with keywords as it can do more harm than good with your SEO rankings. As much as possible, limit your writing to one or two long-tail keywords per blog.
Step 2: Content Writing
Great blog content is defined by its value and usefulness to both readers and search engines. Use these tips to optimise your blog posts for search while keeping your audience in mind.
Write valuable content. As you write, remember that you’re writing primarily to inform and provide valuable content to readers. So, never write a blog post that appeals exclusively to search engines.
Write no less than 300 words. There are many contrasting opinions about what word count is ideal for a blog. But, as a best practice, many SEO companies in Singapore suggest writing at least 300 words for a blog post.
Use the primary keyword throughout the content. Placing your keywords where it fits naturally helps search engines understand and categorise your page. As agreed by several SEO companies in Singapore, a good keyword density is about 2% or about 1-2 times for every 100 words. Here are some of the strategic placements for your primary keyword:
- In the first paragraph
- In a subheading
- Towards the end of the article
Create original content. Duplicate content isn’t an SEO-friendly set-up for your blog. Don’t copy content from other pages regardless if it’s from your website or others. Writing original content that hasn’t been published anywhere online is key to boosting the SEO rankings of your blog.
Avoid grammatical and spelling errors. It’s not merely users who want high-quality, error-free content. Search engines also rank pages based on their grammar, syntax, and spelling. So, checking your copy before publishing is a must to make sure it doesn’t include typos and mistakes.
Step 3: Optimise
Once your content is up, you can then optimise your blog for SEO. below are some tips:
Add links. There are primarily two types of links you should include in your blog post: inbound and outbound links. Inbound links are hyperlinks to pages that exist on your website, these help search engines understand your pages and at the same time, direct users to the information they need.
Outbound links, on the other hand, are hyperlinks to pages that exist on another website. When adding these links to your content, make sure to use anchor texts that are closely related to the keyword of the page you’re linking to.
Use the primary keyword strategically. Besides using the keywords throughout the content, it should also appear in the following:
- Page Title – the actual name of the page that can be viewed on the page
- Permalink– the part of the URL that’s unique for each webpage and post.
- SEO Title– the secondary title of the page that’s visible on the SERPs.
- Meta Description– the often 160-character snippets that are found under the SEO title on SERPs.
- Image Alt Tags – the text description of an image visible only to search engine crawlers and not to users.
Step 4: Promote
Of course, all these efforts would never reach their full potential if you don’t promote your SEO-friendly content. Drive traffic by sharing your blog post on your social media channels, sending it to your email list and/or alerting anyone you used as a reference about their inclusion.
You can continue promoting your article long after its publishing date by linking to it in your future blog posts. These steps will go a long way in expanding your reach beyond your contacts.
It takes time to learn how to write SEO-friendly blog posts and even longer for all your hard work to pay off. But it’s never too late to start! With these tips, you can learn a valuable skill that is optimising your blog posts for SEO.
If you’re having a hard time to get started, you can always find help from a digital marketing agency in Singapore like OOm.
