SEO friendly blog post

Writing a blog requires a bit of command over the language, and skill to be able to make readers hooked to the entire length of the blog, and at the same time reader can take meaningful input from your blog.

And if you want to rank your blog on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) you must know how to write SEO-friendly blog posts.

Some of the technical factors of your website like Domain Rank, Page Load Speed, etc.. definitely play a role to boost your ranking, which should be taken care of. Along with these technical factors, the way you write your blog post is important to rank your post in search engines.

In this blog, we will be discussing what factors should be considered while writing a blog so that you increase the chance of ranking your blog post on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP).

10 Factors to be considered while writing SEO friendly blog post

Keyword research
Focus keyword
URL (length less than 75 characters)
Title of the blog
Header tags
Table of content
Shorter paragraphs
Length of the post (1000 words)
Include media elements
External & internal links

We will now discuss each of the SEO factors to rank the blog post

1. Keyword research

Keyword research is an inevitable activity that you should do as a first step when you have started thinking about writing on a topic. Proper keyword research will help you in deciding if the topic you are thinking to write is worth it or not.

It will also give an insight into how people are searching for the keywords related to your topic.

Certain free tools would help you in keyword research.

Google Keyword Planner – Google keyword planner will give you an idea of what people are searching for and how popular the queries are.
Google Trend – Google trends will help you understand what keywords are popular at any given point in time.
Ubersugest – Ubersuggest is a tool that gives you an overview of your domain, top SEO pages for a said keyword, keyword suggestions, content ideas, backlink data, etc.

Keyword research will help you in identifying the primary keywords & secondary keywords you should target in your blog post.

To understand the keyword research in detail, please go to the link here.

2. Focus keyword

Once you have completed the keyword research, you would have identified your primary & secondary keyword. Now the key is you should include your primary keyword at the following places which would help the Google algorithm understand what your blog post is about!

URL
Title
Description
Within 1st 10% of the content
Within the content
In the conclusion
Subheadings
Alt text
Image filename

3. URL (length less than 75 characters)

The URL of the blog post appears on SERP when your webpage appears after searching for the respective keyword.

Include your primary keyword in the URL, it helps Google to understand what your blog is about.

Important Note: If you change the URL after a post is published, you need to add 301 redirects to preserve the ranking.

4. Title of the blog

The title of the blog has to be strategically decided. It should include your primary keyword in a way that makes sense and is meaningful when any human reads it.

Most of the time bloggers try to include the keyword in the title just for the sake of including it but it doesn’t make any sense to the reader. This should strictly be taken care of.

Some of the characteristics of a catchy title are,

It should have 55-60 characters so that it is shown in SERP without breaks.
It should include your primary keyword
It should explain the content of the blog post
It should be intriguing enough to make users click on the link when it appears on SERP
The title should contain positive or negative sentiments
- Eg. Affluent, Dazzling, Despicable, Hard-hearted, etc.
The title should contain power word
- Eg. Free, Bonus, Secret, Unique, etc.
The title should contain a number
- Eg. 10 factors to consider for writing SEO-friendly blog posts, 7 ways to improve your ranking, etc.

(include a snippet of the title of this blog post, once the blog is published)

5. Header tags

Header helps Google Web Crawlers understand your blog post and sections within it.

Headings within your blog post give a structure to the page. Subheadings narrow down from the headings and allow users to identify the sub-topics of the blogs.

Usage of primary keywords is suggested in some of the headings or subheadings to help Google understand the structure of the post.

Well-optimized blog posts should follow a simple rule when it comes to defining different heading tags.

H1 tag – This is usually the title of the page, but not necessary every time. The point to be taken is, that a blog post should have only one H1 tag.

H2 tags – The main sections of the post should be H2 tags.

H3 tags – The subsections of the post should be H3 tags.

H4 to H6 tags – Other tags should follow the hierarchy as H4-H5-H6

6. Table of content

The table of content helps readers understand the different sub-topics discussed in the blog. It is advisable to have a clickable table of content. It will help readers quickly navigate to the subtopic they want to read about.

From the search engine’s perspective, it helps crawlers to clearly understand what subtopics are discussed in the blog.

If you are using WordPress as your CMS, you can install the plugin Easy Table of Content to insert a table of content in your post based on your header tags.

7. Shorter paragraphs

It is advised to have shorter paragraphs in the blog post, it enhances the readability. A paragraph of 2-3-5 sentences is ideal to have. Usage of various formatting options like bold, italic, underline, and bullet points in the paragraphs make it look less boring and hooks the readers to continue reading the post.

In today’s world, the internet is mostly accessed from mobile devices and the possibilities are high that the majority of your readers will also be reading your blogs on mobile, so having shorter paragraphs makes it easy for them to read the content.

8. Length of the post (1000 – 2500 words)

Studies show that longer blog posts perform better in search. But keep in mind that if your posts are long and not easy to read, it may scare the visitors, and they might run away.

That is the reason, in point no 7 it is advisable to have a shorter paragraph to make it readable. The other way to make your post more readable is by including media elements like images, GIFs, videos, tables, etc. We will be discussing media elements in point no 8.

Let us understand why it is advised to have a longer post,

Having a longer post explains the topic in detail, but make sure you stick to the topic and write what is relevant as per the topic.
The current trend for most blogs is that they have content of 500-1000 words, which might be ranking for a certain set of keywords, and if you want to outrank these blogs your content has to be fresh and in detail about the topic.
I would suggest ideally having a post of 1000-2500 words.

9. Include media elements

As we discussed in the previous point, the length of the blog post should be 1000-2500 words, so that you are in a better position to outrank your competitor and explain the topic to the reader in a better way.

Now, when you have a lengthy post with just the textual content, it will bore the readers and they might show less interest in completely reading the post.

To make the post engaging try to include various media elements like images, embedded video, graphs, and tables within the post. These media elements help to break the large block of text and improve the user experience. This also increases the time the reader spends on the page and helps to understand the content better.

10. Internal & External links

Linking your posts internally to other posts or externally linking to high authority websites helps both readers and search engines to know more about your post.

Internal link –
- It helps the audience to discover more of your content and start perceiving your website as a trustworthy & credible source of information.
- It helps search engines discover new pages on your website while crawling search engine spiders will follow the link and add it to their index.
- It allows visitors to stay longer on your website, and it’s a smart technique to reduce the bounce rate.
External link – Linking your post to a high authority website offers readers additional reading material to increase their knowledge and it also shows search engines that you have done your research while writing the post.

You can very well use keywords in the anchor text of the blog.

Conclusion

The key takeaway from this post is,

When you start thinking about a topic to write about, spend some time doing research on the topic and what you want to achieve by writing on it.

Once you have a clear picture in mind, do keyword research and take out primary & secondary keywords, and include them in various places mentioned above.

Outline the post by putting down topics and subtopics you want to include in the post.

Then following the factors mentioned above, you will be able to write an SEO-friendly blog post that will give value to the reader and at the same time, it will help search engine crawlers to identify your topic and increase your chance of ranking your blog post.

Do you have any clarification about the topic? Let me know in the comments below.

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