If you’ve been following my blog at all, you know I’m a sucker for a good checklist. If I can make a to-do list out of it, chances are I will. That same thought process goes as well with SEO as it does blogging. In fact, I’ve been known to create many small, easy to read checklists for bloggers who want step by step help on blogging best practices or SEO.
So let me walk you through the essentials for good blogging practices.
Bring a new twist to old topics.
This last tip is more for the benefit of your readers than for the benefit of search engines. Don’t just regurgitate what’s been said before. Absolutely do not just go find the most popular post for a given keyword and have someone rewrite that post. Find new research if you can. Or go further and email an expert to get an original quote from them. That’s the sort of information that can’t be found anywhere else.
As you publish great posts, your bounce rates go down. People will stay longer on your site, and come back more and more. Google is tracking all of that. They are laser-focused on delivering a good user experience for their users. If your post has the earmarks of a post that people like, Google will reward your page with traffic.
Add your keyword into the URL of your post.
It’s another small signal that shows the page really is about the keyword. Also, seeing the keyword in the URL helps the human searcher have more confidence in picking your page from all the other listings.
Keep the meta description to 150 characters and spaces. Think of your meta tags as if they were ad copy … because they are. It’s funny how we obsess and test pay-per-click ad copy, but barely spend a minute writing meta description tags. Those meta description tags will be seen right next to that precious PPC ad copy. Your meta descriptions are competing against PPC copy, so make them count.
It’s time to write those descriptions as carefully as if they were ad copy. Use Portent’s SERP (Search Engine Results Page) preview tool to see how your work will appear.
Link to other pages on your website.
These “interior links” send page authority to other pages on your site. Having other pages of your site pointing to this new post also helps it get found faster. It also passes some page authority from those existing pages to your new page.
Link to other pages on the web.
A few years ago, some SEO experts worried about losing page authority if they linked out from their page to other sites. Times have changed. It’s good to link out to other pages on the web.
Other marketers worry about sending readers away from their site because the reader may never come back. I sympathize with this concern, but sharing great resources with your reader benefits them. To pretend there are no other good resources on the rest of the web is disingenuous.
Remember, your readers can leave in a heartbeat. They want you to show them what’s important, what’s worth seeing online. If you do so, they will trust you more and come back to your blog.
Invite comments.
Comments are not a huge signal to the search engines that your page is worth indexing, but they help. You want comments. Do not turn off comments.
If you’ve turned comments off because you’re overwhelmed with comment spam, go get the WordPress plugin Akismet and install it today. There is a free version. Akismet may not get rid of every possible spam comment, but it will reduce the spam comments you have to deal with by about 95%.
Go easy on the tags.
Tags are basically subcategories you can use to organize your posts. For example, this post might have the tags, “SEO,” “keywords,” and “headlines.” You’ll probably recognize tags from the tag clouds some blogs use. Add a couple of tags to each post, but avoid overusing them.
Focus on user intent (not search engines)
Gone are the days when mentioning your keyword as many times as humanly possible is what got you ranked.
Google’s algorithms have wisened up, and today, it’s all about quality content and addressing user intent—what people are looking to find when they type a word or phrase into a search engine bar.
Thankfully, we don’t need Spock’s mind-melding abilities to discover what people might really be looking for when they search for something. Google has already figured it out.
Type your keyword into the search box and look at the “People also ask” and “Searches related to” sections. Clicking on a website and then pressing your browser’s back button sometimes also reveals a “People also search for” box beneath the clicked site. These are all questions and problems people are asking, and you can address in your post.
While you’re on the SERP, take time to look at how your competitors answered the user’s intent.
Aim to address the reader’s challenges better and make your post an even more useful guide for them.
Consider:
- How long is your competitor’s post? Your blog post should be at least the same length.
- What resources can you add? Think videos, helpful websites, downloadable templates (like my blog post templates).
- What concepts can you explain better or expand on?
- If you were the reader, what would make the post more useful to you?
Writing a 10,000-word rambling blog post just because you think that’s what you should do won’t improve your SEO. But creating a targeted article that is a one-stop guide for the exact answers your target audience needs, definitely will.
Answer reader’s questions right, and you might even get a coveted spot as position #0 on Google’s featured snippet section.
Here are two of my featured snippets to give you an idea of how they appear and what Google likes to see.
First up, is my guide to starting a freelance business:
And next, we’ve got my ultimate list of side business ideas:
You’ll notice that while featured snippets answer the user’s question right away, more often than not, it’s too small to provide a complete answer directly within the box.
So, people click on your link to get the full story, and your article can get a major boost from this placement—making it a major blog SEO win.
Take your time writing blog SEO-friendly headlines
You can write the best blog post ever to grace the Internet, but if you can’t get your audience to click on your blog headline and read the article, then it doesn’t exist.
You also need people to click on your post because the more reads, shares, and likes it has, the more Google sees it’s what people want when they search for your keyword. Google rewards high click-through rates with better search rankings.
When it comes to learning how to write a headline, first and foremost, you’ll need to tell your reader how they’re going to benefit from your blog post.
And then you need to deliver on that promise.
For example, this post promises these SEO tips for blogs can get you hundreds of thousands of readers per month if diligently followed. And it can because it’s how I got my 584,958 readers per month.
But, if your title makes over-exaggerated claims and doesn’t live up to it with your content, it’s clickbait.
Avoid at all costs.
When you fail to keep your promise to the reader, it breaks the reader’s trust and hurts you more than it helps. Clickbait titles also cause higher bounce rates, which leads to lower site rankings for you.
The second step is to make your title irresistible to click on. The best titles are a mixture of proven formulas and a balance of common, uncommon, emotional, and power words.
Thankfully, the kind people at Co-Schedule created a headline-analyzing tool that factors all of this for you, tells you how likely your title is to get shares, and breaks down your score result.
Here’s how my own SEO headline for my ultimate guide to start a blog scores:
Scores above 70 are considered good and are great titles for social media sharing. Anything in the 80s is excellent and definitely winning headline when it comes to blog SEO.
From a blog SEO standpoint, your main keyword needs to be in your headline.
“SEO for bloggers: If your target keyword phrase isn’t early on in your headline, it’s time to rewrite your headline.”CLICK TO TWEET
Titles get cut off in SERPs after 60 characters. There’s not really a compelling reason to have a title longer than that many characters, but if you do go over the limit—just be sure your target keyword is at the front of your title.
Yoast is an extremely popular (free) WordPress plugin that’ll help with SEO for bloggers who want to make sure your title and the content of your articles check all the right fundamental SEO boxes.
If understandably, you’re having trouble writing a catchy title that tells the reader the benefit AND is SEO-friendly, you can also create a separate SEO title to show up in search results using Yoast.
Click “edit snippet” on the Yoast section of the WP editor, then delete the automatic title tags there and write in your own SEO-friendly title that’ll do better in search results.
While your SEO title should still be compelling, you can play around with the structure.
For example, here’s my SEO title from a Google featured snippet:
And here is the title you’ll see when you click the post:
I use a different SEO title because my research suggests that in search results, it’s better to connect starting a blog with making money from blogging relatively early on in the headline—to clearly show what benefits readers will get from clicking my link.
Use the right heading tags
Heading tags (H-tags) are formatting options you can apply to the content of your post.
Rather than changing font sizes to emphasize headings, you should select your heading sizes from the menu.
Here’s how to select your heading formats in both the WordPress content editor and in Google Docs:
Correct headings are incredibly important for SEO.
Google scans them to discover the main point of your content, which makes them absolutely essential—especially for getting your on-page SEO dialed in properly.
Here’s how to properly use them, in order of importance, for search engine optimization.
Heading 1: Can only be used once and is usually reserved for your title. Include your primary keyword here.
Heading 2: These are the big ideas of your post. They are also crucial for SEO and are great places to work in both your head and long-tail keywords. Take a look at mine, and you’ll see I did exactly that.
Heading 3: These are the subtopics or smaller ideas that fall under your H2. For this article, it’s each of our 10 SEO tips for bloggers. You can add keywords here too.
Heading 4-6: Used to help with formatting and styling of your page. These have the least amount of SEO value.
It’s also incredibly important to include your main target keyword in the first 100 words of your introduction.“Want to nail your blog SEO? Be sure to include your target keyword within the first 100 words of your blog post.”CLICK TO TWEET
Your target keyword phrase and its variations should be sprinkled throughout the body of your article in a natural, conversational manner. As mentioned before, keyword stuffing just to get a few more mentions in, is something to avoid.
The free Yoast plugin is also a great help here.
Conclusion
This write-up is a contribution to all the bloggers who want to know about SEO. For gaining peak traffic, you will have to focus on SEO for your blog posts. There are certain things you have to take care of before getting started.