Search engines love websites that are regularly updated with fresh content. Monthly, weekly or even daily blog posts can provide a nice SEO boost to your website. However, the topic you’re writing about is not the only aspect you should consider. You must also ensure that each of your blog posts is well written and search engine optimised.
This guide will provide you with some important tips for creating SEO friendly blog posts.
Using appropriate keywords
Keywords are specific words that appear throughout websites that are significant to the topic of the site or the page. They are something that you should be mindful of not only when creating the pages for your website but also within any blog posts that you write.
To find the best keywords for a blog post you should consider the topic of the post and also what words people are likely to search for in Google to find the information or service that they are looking for. You can use websites such as Google Trends or the Adwords Keyword Planner to find out a range of different statistics to see what keywords or search terms are currently popular and can give you a good insight into what to use in your own blog post.
Length & Formatting of your blog post
You should ensure that your blog posts have a reasonable amount of content within them and that it is highly readable. Having too little content in your posts is not good for your SEO and reduces your opportunities to include keywords, links and images. It’s also not good for your readers because the post will likely lack the information they are looking for. 300 words are generally considered to be the minimum amount for an optimised blog post.
The way a blog post is formatted is also important. Nobody wants to read through a huge wall of text, so try to divide your content up with line breaks to divide into paragraphs to drastically improve the readability. Other content might read better if it is turned into a concise bullet point list and also headings and subheadings can also help to further divide large blocks of text.
If you are creating your blog posts through WordPress then the Yoast plugin can help you keep track of the word count and readability of your posts making any problems easier to identify and fix.
links to other pages
Blog posts provide a great opportunity to build a large number of links within your website.
Providing internal links to other pages or blog posts on your website can make it easier for your visitors to navigate around the site and explore more it. This can be great for increasing the amount of time people will remain on your website and lower your bounce rate. It also makes it easier for search engines to crawl and generate a sitemap for your website which will improve your SEO.
External links are links to other pages outside of your website. These types of links can help improve the domain authority and search engine rankings for your website if you can provide links to other very high ranking websites.
Meta titles & descriptions
The meta title and meta description are the small snippets of text that search engines will display when they show a link to one of your pages. Good meta titles and descriptions are very important for enticing people into your website.
The title should be a concise summary of the purpose of the page. For a blog, it will generally be similar to the title you give to your blog post.
The description should contain around 150 characters and give a brief overview of the topic of the blog post. Try to fit your keyword for the post in the meta description if possible to help your post show up sooner when people search for that keyword. The image above is an example of the meta title and description for this blog post you’re currently reading.
Image optimisation
Using images is a great way to break up large amounts of text and generally make the post more interesting to look at.
Any images you use should be correctly alt tagged as this can improve your SEO score and makes the images easier to understand for users that may be blind or visually impaired. The size of the image should also be considered, as you don’t want unnecessarily large images slowing down the loading speed of the page. Before uploading an image to your post check its file size and if it seems large then consider using an image compression tool to lower its size without sacrificing any visual quality.
For more information about optimising images for the internet check out our guide on improving page speed.
