To have a successful blog, you need to create good content that people love and share through their social network accounts. Also, you have to help Google index your pages easily. At the same time, you should never worry about SEO, if you use the simple tips to allow search engine crawlers, to find your content and index it fast. In this post, you’ll learn how to optimize your blog post easily.
Tips to write an SEO friendly blog post
Don’t worry about the post length
To make things clear, search engines and Google, especially, don’t take the blog post length into consideration when indexing your page. Believe it or not, I know that some marketers are still believing that you should write 2400 words, or more, to get ranked on the first page of Google.
Well, it was right for the last decade relatively, but sure, you’ve noticed that some blog posts ranked number one on Google with pages of 350 words sometimes. This doesn’t mean to write those 350 words, or you will be marked as a spammer, just let things work naturally.
If a blog post needs 3000 words to show your idea and explain things, this will be the best thing to do. But, if your idea can be clearly explained in just 400 words. It’s also great and helpful for people who don’t have the time to read long articles.
Answer these questions before publishing your posts.
So, the most important is the content and not the length. If Google limits its top ranking to 2000 words, Wikipedia will dominate 90% of the first page of Google without a problem. But, it’s not the case, things are more complicated in the algorithm, and the quality is everything, with backlinks, of course.
Select the right title for your blog post
Nobody can neglect the role of eyes catching article titles, they attract more clicks from SERP. But, not all bloggers can create those catchy titles. It’s really an art, if you can create a title that includes your key-phrase and be attractive for people who want to click, you will succeed in optimizing the most important part of the blog post optimization.
However, you should never forget that your title should be less than 70 characters in length. This is the maximum number of characters to be displayed in the Google SERP.
Use key-phrases instead of Keywords
The keyword is the hardest way to start blogging, simply because 99% of keywords are used by thousands, if not millions of sites. So, it’s not recommended at all to try to rank for keywords, you can’t beat thousands of high authority sites with millions of dollars in their advertising pocket.
Instead, look for key phrases, you can rank well with them. For example, you will never reach the first position in Google with the keyword “car” ask yourself how much money Ford, Ferrari, Toyota, and other car constructors companies can invest to get ranked for that keyword.
To succeed with key phrases you should never stuff them in your article, it will destroy your ranking. Take it easy and use it once in your post body, this will be natural and best of all, good for both, humans, and search engines.
So, use it once in your title and once in your article body, and forget everything about keyword and keyphrase density. The Content and some quality links are what you will rank for. Everything else is just a small help to make Google crawlers “happy” with your blog.
Optimize your images
To be clear, there is only one single thing to optimize your images fr SEO, it’s using the ALT tag to let search engines read what your image is about. As you know, search engine crawlers can’t see your images, but they see their ALT tag. It describes your images to them, so, make sure to add some phrases whenever you upload an image to your blog.
But remember to stay natural, don’t write a paragraph there, just add something like this: “biggest square in New York”. Thus, Google crawlers understand that your image will talk about ”the biggest square in New York”. Of course, that Alt tag should be related to your article topic.
You need also to think about the loading time of your site, nothing will be helpful with a well-configured server and fast loading time.
The post description
Your post description won’t help in ranking, but, it’s very important for people who read the Google search page result before clicking. You need to describe, in that 155 characters space, what your post talking about. At the same time, be relevant as possible, don’t add things that people can’t find in your article.
That will build a bad relation with visitors and search engines, and you will lose people. The best way to create a good description is to ask yourself if you will click on it on Google if you’re a visitor.
Your Social Presence
The social presence gives a positive signal that your content is useful and sharable. This never means to post links here and there on Facebook and Twitter and expect to rank. But, you should build an audience with Facebook, Google plus, and Twitter users, in the end, you get visitors and give a positive signal to search engines.
Google plus shares and engagement impact your ranking in the near future, and you need to take that into consideration.
Blog interlinking
You need to link to your old blog posts or articles. It’s good for users, they find extra content to read, and also good for SEO, search engines find all your posts and link them. Best of all, you help your site yourself with extra page views.
So, make sure to link your posts, this can be done with just one link on each page at least. At the same time, focus on relevant articles, and not just linking them, link to posts that are related to your actual page. And most important, never go crazy with links, just add a few ones when applicable.
Conclusion
How to optimize a blog post is a popular question, but we’ve learned in the past years that search engine optimization SEO has changed. Keyword density is no longer counted, and other factors will be added, but the best way to succeed and stay independent from SEO updates is to write the content that people enjoy and that’s easy to read.
