- Choose blog topics with keyword research.
You should write your blog posts based on the most important questions and concerns of your customers. But if you want those customers to find your content, you need to use the same keywords that they use to find answers. You can find these words with keyword research.
Keyword research can also help you find new topics to write about and grab the interest of new audiences.
Keyword tools can help you find and narrow down your list of keywords so that you’re writing the right blogs for your target audience.
2. Write a compelling blog post title.
The task of writing a title is challenging. A lot of bloggers spend time writing a blog post, then quickly add a title when they’re done and hope for the best. But blog titles have a bigger impact than you might think.
First, titles tell your audience what to expect from your post. Readers will be unhappy if your post doesn’t address the smart and catchy question in your blog title.
Title Tag
Last but not least, titles are crucial to blog SEO. The purpose of this section is to showcase your keywords in an authentic manner. This is referred to as the “title tag” in Google search results.
Be sure to include your keyword within the first 60 characters of your title, which is just about where Google cuts titles off on the SERP. Technically, Google measures by pixel width, not character count. It recently increased the pixel width for organic search results from approximately 500 pixels to 600 pixels, which translates to around 60 characters.
3. Outline your blog post with SEO in mind.
If you’re used to writing blog posts from your imagination with a free flow of ideas, blog SEO might sound like a challenge. But anyone can create great SEO writing with a strong outline.
An outline can help you organize your ideas around your target keywords. It can also give you a space to figure out the best spot to include the features that make a blog post great like:
Videos
Statistics
Quotes
Internal and external links.
4. Use keywords strategically throughout the blog post.
Headers & Body
In the body of your post and in the headers, mention your keyword regularly. That means including your keywords in your copy, but only in a natural, reader-friendly way. Don’t go overboard at the risk of being penalized for keyword stuffing.
Whenever you create content, your primary focus should be on what matters to your audience, not how many times you can include a keyword or keyword phrase in that content.
URL
Search engines also look at your URL to figure out what your post is about, and it’s one of the first things it’ll crawl on a page.
You have a huge opportunity to optimize your URLs on every post you publish, as every post lives on its unique URL — so make sure you include your one to two keywords in it.
5. Make sure your blog post covers your topic completely.
Your post must include more than just focus and supporting keywords to be considered SEO for your blog. You’ll want to make each post as comprehensive as possible to make sure it answers your readers’ questions.
Exactly what does “comprehend” mean? For some, it’s a matter of word count. SEO experts recommend that blog posts be between 2,100 and 2,400 words long.