11 Factors for Optimizing Your Blog Posts for SEO like a Professional
Most of our readers have asked us for sharing some of the factors for optimizing blogs posts for SEO, so that they can achieve better rankings of search.
Topics for Optimizing Blog Posts
- Plan Your Content with Appropriate Keyword Research
- Discover Semantic Keywords for Your Focus Keyword
- Write an Effective Title for Blog Posts
- Turn Internal Linking into a Habit
- Add Some Images and Videos to Your Blog Posts
- Add a Meta Description to Your Blog Post
- Make Your Articles Easier to Read
- Use Some Categories and Tags for Organizing Content
- Aim to Be the Highlighted Snippet in The Search Result
- Make Your Blog Posts Inclusive
- Optimize Older Blog Posts
Most of our readers have asked us for sharing some of the factors for optimizing blogs posts for SEO, so that they can achieve better rankings of search.
The best time for optimizing your blog content for SEO is when you create it, but you can constantly go back and enhance your old articles.
Know more about: Blog Post Writing Service
Blog SEO is significant as it helps you obtain more traffic to your website consistently. There are enormous factors you can use for optimizing your blog posts for SEO.
In this article, our best blog SEO factors are shared to help you optimize your blog posts for SEO like a professional. These are the factors which we use on our blogs, getting millions of visitors from search engines.
1. Plan Your Content with Appropriate Keyword Research
Most of the beginners only use their best guesses to write on the topics they think that their users would be interested in.
You should not rely on blind guesses, particularly when you can do keyword research for finding out exactly what your users are searching for.
Keyword research is a method which is used by content creators and SEO experts. In addition, it helps you find the topics your users are interested in according to the search engine data.
Then, you can use such keywords to plan your content strategy. It should be noted that it will ensure that you write on the topics which people are searching for, and it is a perfect way of finding new blog post ideas.
We suggest using keyword research tools such as SEMRush. They present in-depth keyword data, competition analysis, keyword position tracking, and lots of other useful properties.
If you use SEMRush, you would want to check their SEO Writing Assistant tool. It helps you to find LSI and related keywords, readability, language tone, as well as the average article length.
For more detailed instructions, visit our article on how to use keyword research for blog posts.
2. Discover Semantic Keywords for Your Focus Keyword
After doing your keyword research and discovering keyword ideas, pick one of them which has the highest search volume but low competition.
It will be considered as your focus keyword. It is the search phrase which your users are most probably to search for.
If you apply the All in One SEO plugin, you can establish the focus keyword in your article’s SEO settings. It would let you see how you have used it effectively in your article.
Then, you need to search the Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords. Such keywords are related to your focus keyword.
The easiest way for discovering them is to simply enter your focus keyword in Google Search and go to the bottom of the results. Then, you can find them listed as ‘related searches’.
You should incorporate many of such keywords in your content so that you can find the most complete content for users.
It is highly significant that you do not attempt to stuff them in your content. It would look weird to your users and search engines are somehow good at finding keyword stuffing.
3. Write an Effective Title for Blog Posts
The title of your blog post is highly essential for search rankings.
A perfect blog post title makes your article more related to the search query. It is more important to motivates users to click on your article while they see it in search results.
You can turn your blog post title into more SEO friendly post through your focus keyword in the title.
In addition to adding your focus keyword, we suggest making your headline interesting and click-worthy. It is because click-through rate (CTR) plays a key role in SEO.
There are numerous formulas for writing effective headlines. One of them which still works is called EMV or emotional marketing value.
This formula recommends the use of power words which trigger specific emotional responses among your audience.
If you use the MonsterInsights plugin, it results in a built-in headline analyzer tool which provides you with a headline score right in the WordPress admin area. In addition, it involves real-time tips for improving your title for higher click-through rates.
There are some other online tools which you can apply such as IsItWP Headline Analyzer that helps you calculate your title’s EMV score.
For more factors, visit this article on headlines which went viral and imitating their success in your own articles.
4. Turn Internal Linking into a Habit
When you have blogged for a while, you will have sufficient content which you would ask users to read. With such internal linking, you can send new readers towards checking your older related posts.
Internal linking is a perfect way for developing a contextual relationship between your novel and old posts. It also lets you pass related link juice to your older articles.
WordPress makes it easy to search for your old posts just inside the post editor. Simply choose the text that you want to link and then click on the link button.
A text pop-up will show up under your selected words. You can begin typing to search for the older articles which you want to link here.
Making internal linking a habit will ensure that your on-page SEO is super, and that your older articles continue to obtain new links.
Related: Visit our inclusive guide on adding a link in WordPress.
Often beginners make the mistake of performing one-way internal linking in which they link to older posts from new articles. You can and should go back to edit older posts to link to your new articles for maximum advantages.
5. Add Some Images and Videos to Your Blog Posts
Most of the time, search engines rank engaging content as higher in search results. Images and videos are far more involving than plain text.
You want to ensure that your blog posts contain images between paragraphs.
When adding images, you aim to be careful about image copyrights. Often beginners copy images from other websites to apply on their website, and this can obtain you in legal problem if you do so with no appropriate permissions.
Do not get worried, there are numerous places in which you can discover royalty free images to apply in your blog posts. You can use your original photographs or use websites such as Canva to establish engaging graphics.
Ensure that you optimize your images for SEO. See our tutorial on how optimizing images for search engines for detailed instructions.
Videos are even more engaging than images. You can convert your blog posts into videos by establishing slideshows, vlogs, or experiment with other kinds of format.
Nevertheless, you should never directly upload videos to your blog posts. WordPress is not optimized for serving videos, and your shared hosting service cannot deal with them.
We suggest uploading your videos to YouTube. It is the second most famous search engine, and the second biggest social media platform just after Facebook.
Visit our article on embedding videos in WordPress for more details.
6. Add a Meta Description to Your Blog Post
The Meta description refers to an HTML meta tag so that you can add to any kind of page. Its aim is to prepare a short description of your article for search engines.
Some SEO experts state that the meta description tag on a page has become unimportant. Nevertheless, many others would disagree. At WPBeginner, we suggest using the meta description for all of your posts.
A perfect meta description can discuss a lot more about an article. Social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn display it when your articles are shared on those platforms.
Since now you realize that people are supposed to be reading your meta descriptions, you aim to make sure that it is useful.
In addition, you want to make sure that at least you mention your focus keyword once in the meta description for search purposes. The character limit for Meta Description is 155 characters.
Attempt to remain in that limit or your meta description will be truncated after 155 characters. Furthermore, you aim to make sure that you apply the focus keyword earlier in the meta description than later.
In order to add meta description, you should go to the AIOSEO meta box on your post edit screen.
7. Make Your Articles Easier to Read
Readability refers to a significant factor regarded by search engines. The articles which are easier to read often rank higher than articles which are not user friendly.
Computer and mobile screens are not yet considered as an optimal platform for reading.
That is why most users just scan through articles. In fact, some studies found that users spend less than a second to decide if they want to remain on a page or leave.
It is a very short time for you to convince the user to stay and go through. Through improving readability, you can make it possible for your users to scan an article quickly.
You can enhance readability using shorter sentences, smaller paragraphs, punctuation, headings, and bulleted lists. We suggest adding white space around text and apply some images to make your text look easier.
If you apply the All in One SEO plugin, it will automatically analyze readability issues and make some suggestions for you in the analysis section. In addition, you can use the tools such as Grammarly, that allows you to check grammar, punctuation, and spelling on the fly. Further, it gives some suggestions to enhance the readability of your articles.
For more on this topic, visit our article on improving the readability score of your blog posts.
8. Use Some Categories and Tags for Organizing Content
Categories and tags help you sort out your content not only for yourself, but for the readers and search engines.
The problem is that many WordPress beginners often end up applying them inappropriately.
If you think about your website as a book, categories would be the table of contents and tags will be the index part of the book.
Categories are used for dividing your content into major topics discussed on your blog. Tags are the topics discussed in an individual blog post.
In order to learn more, visit our beginner’s guide on the use of categories and tags for maximum SEO advantages.
9. Aim to Be the Highlighted Snippet in The Search Result
Google has been attempting to answer the user questions as fast as possible. As part of this endeavor, they introduced the highlighted result or answer box.
This is the highlighted search result which shows up on the top. Google creates an ordinary snippet from the article’s content manifesting the part that their algorithms believe to be the answer of user’s query.
Based on the research performed by Advanced Web Ranking, Answer boxes secure approximately 32.3% CTR. It makes them greatly significant for your SEO strategy.
There is no special set of instructions presented by Google regarding how they pick the highlighted snippet. Their suggestion is to enhance your content and make sure which it presents the information users are searching.
At WPBeginner, we have established helpful tips according to our research which will help you show up in Google answer boxes with your blog posts.
10. Make Your Blog Posts Inclusive
Search engines love the articles which cover a topic with lots of details. That is why we wanted you to collect the keywords which are semantically related (LSI Keywords) as part of your content planning step.
Such related keywords provide you with an idea of various types of user searches which regard the particular subject. Through covering such keywords in your article, you would be able to make it more inclusive, informative, and useful.
You should apply headings and subheadings in order to include such keywords and attempt to cover as much context as you could.
Beside from LSI keywords, another factor for creating full content is to type your desired keyword and go to Image Search. You will observe topic bubbles with different keywords.
We suggest including these while establishing your content, so that you can have the most inclusive content.
Most of the beginners are inclined to forget a blog post after they have published it. Indeed, you are not optimizing your blog post for SEO once it is published.
Here are some factors which you should conduct after publishing your blog post:
Promote it on the social media – Promote your blog post on your social media profiles. You can even automate such a task using IFTTT to share your content.
Add internal links – When you have published a post, you can go back to related old articles and add a link to your new blog post. It gives your new articles link juice and also lets users discover it more easily.
Track search rankings – You have optimized a post for SEO, but how can you keep track of its rankings? Visit our guide on tracking search rankings for your blog posts.
We suggest optimizing old posts on a regular basis, so that you can continue to enhance your rankings.
We hope that the present article helped you optimize your blog posts for SEO like a professional. Do you need more factors for promoting your content? Visit our article on how getting more traffic to your blog posts, and our comparison of the best email marketing services for connecting with your readers.
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