Writing a killer blog post is a huge part of getting readers engaged and eager to buy from you. But if your awesome content is buried ten pages into Google, no one will ever see it. SEO optimisation is how you make sure your blog ranks highly on search engines. This will boost your blog’s visibility and in turn, convert sales. To get as many eyes on your website as possible, be sure to follow this SEO guide as you prepare your content.
Tips to Optimize Your Blog Posts
Plan Your Blog with SEO in Mind
Focus keywords are the terms and phrases that you want your post to rank for in search engines like Google. So before you start typing away about your amazing idea, you need to make sure you understand what the goal and purpose of the blog post is as this will define what your focus keywords should be.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- What audience are you trying to reach?
- What problem are you helping your reader solve?
- What is the take-home message you want to give your readers?
- What research do you need to do before you start writing?
- How will you structure your article?
Asking yourself these questions will not only save you time when you start writing, but will also help you zero in on your focus keyword for your blog post. This will come in handy in the next step as you apply SEO techniques to your writing.
Write Your Article
Now that you have a clear idea of the intent and structure of your blog, you’ve done all the research you need, and you know what your focus keyword is, it’s time to write. Don’t worry too much about writing a perfectly constructed blog post on the first go. There’s no need to write an introduction and conclusion right away.
Use your answers to the questions above and your focus keyword to help you extract your ideas from your brain and get them onto the page. No one but you will see this first draft, so don’t worry about it looking messy.
Organize Your Brainstorming into a Polished Blog Post
You’ve dumped all your great ideas onto the page. Now it’s time to edit them into a shiny SEO-optimised blog. This is often the most time-consuming step, but it’s also the most important. Use your first draft to craft an eye-catching introduction and make sure your focus keyword is in that first paragraph. Use your introduction to create a conclusion paragraph that includes a strong call to action. Use a keyword in your call to action. Reread your first draft and rewrite sentences that are unclear, and make sure you’ve written at least 300 words total.
Give your post subheadings and don’t forget to put a keyword in at least one of them. Add some internal links to your website and be sure to calculate your keyword density. You can do this by hand or use a free website to do the math for you. A good keyword density range to aim for is between 1-3%, though there is no set-in-stone rule for this. As a final step, read through your post and make sure your keywords flow naturally and don’t seem “stuffed”.
When you follow the right steps, optimising your blog posts for SEO is a simple process. Planning, brainstorming, and editing your writing to incorporate keywords will help you increase your website’s visibility and get readers consuming your content in no time.
