5 minute read

How to Properly Write Blog Posts for SEO?

Lets Start Off by Acknowledging that there is a Right Way and a Quick Way to Write Blog Posts!

It depends on how much time and effort you are willing to spend on writing your post and to properly optimize it for SEO. You don’t want to over optimize for search engines and ignore your audience, but then again, how will you build an audience if they can’t find your blog in the beginning. This process might take you about 30 minutes (not including writing the actual article) if you are a beginner, but many people take the quick route and only spend about 5 minutes… obviously you won’t rank as well by cutting corners.

Begin by just Simply Writing your Blog Post

What I do is write an article in Microsoft Word, but I DO NOT post directly into WordPress yet. There are a few steps I go through way before I reach the WordPress publishing stage.

  • First, I select one main keyword (long or short tail) or one specific topic or category to write about as the main focus of my blog post.
  • Second, I gather my research from around the internet and/or inspiration from various sources.
  • Lastly, I let the creative juices flow and just write. I forget about spelling, grammar and punctuation until I’m done writing my blog article. I don’t even think about Search Engines yet, until all else is finished and I’ve developed my Keyword list.

 

Now that your Blog Post is Written, Develop your Keywords

I personally use Professional SEO Software, but you can use a Free Keyword Planning Tool located within Google Adwords. To figure out what to even get Keyword Suggestions on, I look through the text and titles I wrote previously to see what words/phrases are important to the blog post and which terms are constantly repeating throughout my article. This will be easier on longer posts, but can be very difficult to identify on shorter blogs.

Now that I found a few potential keywords and phrases, I will go into my Google Adwords account and just enter them into Google’s Keyword Planning Tool to find Groups and Suggestions. This is found under the “Search for New Keywords” tab with commas separating the long tail and short tail terms. Finally, click the “Keyword Ideas” tab and view ALL the suggestions made by Google.  We are looking for the best keywords to rank for with LOW Competition and HIGH Search Volume per month.

Pick 2-3 of the BEST keywords for short articles and about 5-8 key terms for longer blog posts. Try to be specific with these keywords in relevancy to your current article. Don’t target your entire site (search engines don’t rank sites, they rank pages) or go too broad with your newly developed keyword terms. You might get side tracked with a suggested keyword and lose focus on your topic… DON’T write your blog post for the Keywords, this will cause a major headache when you go back into Microsoft Word and try to force it in there. Forcing keywords in text can hurt you, more than help you in the long run.

 

Diving Back into How to Write Blogs for SEO, while NOT Ignoring your Audience

Now that we chose the BEST possible keywords, go back to your Word Document and try to incorporate these terms in the Headline, any Sub Headlines, Links and Paragraph Text. Do it naturally first for your audience. If you can’t, either ditch it or add some content as long as it completely relates to your initial topic or category. Your paragraph text should be a minimum of 300 words (NOT including headings), but more around the 500 word mark. Microsoft Word has a “Word Counter” under “Tools” to help you quickly add up everything.

Alright, now save it and continue to tweak and edit the content until you are satisfied. You are ready to post this blog post live!!!

 

How to Use What you Wrote and Optimize your Blogs with Yoast

Yoast is an amazing, easy, reputable and FREE SEO Plugin specifically developed for WordPress blogs. Yoast rates your posts, explains what needs to be done to improve your scores, and provides important guidelines to follow for optimal rankings.

  • Your Focus Keyword is the BEST and Most Dense Keyword and/or Phrase that the entire article was written about.
  • Meta Tile should be around 60-70 characters long (including spaces). This can most likely be a different version or combination of your Headers. Don’t just copy and paste it, physically rewrite the Meta Title for best results.
  • The Page URL is essentially your Post Title by default. It is also known as a Page Slug and can be edited if you would like. Especially, if you have a lot of stop words in the URL such as, The, Was, On, etc.
  • Your Meta Description is a brief summary, hand written and fresh, going over your blog posts. It should not exceed 150-155 characters, including spaces.

Don’t skip over this Yoast SEO step or your Blog Post Rankings will suffer. Make sure you categorize your article appropriately, keeping your keywords in mind. Also, tag your post with the keywords your developed. Alt tags are important for images, make sure to organically incorporate those on EVERY image within your post.

 

How to Write Blogs for SEO, your Audience and Yourself

I hear the question over and over again from clients, how do I write blogs for SEO? This is absolutely the wrong question that they should be asking. With this said, I usually answer them back, how much time do you want to spend posting? You should never just target one or the other, since the combo of both the audience and search engine returns the greatest rankings.

As soon as I explain the proper blog posting process for WordPress, they soon realize that this is HARD work and gain a WHOLE NEW Respect for our SEO Services and what we do for their business. Contact Tag Marketing today and get your WordPress Blog in the top rankings and visibility it deserves.

 

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