Tips for an awesome and SEO-friendly blog post

Writing a blog post -like all other writing- is a skill. In order to keep your reader interested, you should think about structuring your text and writing in an appealing style. You should help your readers to grasp the main idea of your post by providing headings, subheadings and clear paragraphs. If people understand and like your text, they are much more likely to share, like, tweet and link to your post. And that will increase your rankings! So, in order to improve your ranking in Google, you should definitely try to maximize your writing skills!

For some, writing for SEO purposes and writing to attract and keep attracting your audience could appear as two contradictory goals. However, I totally disagree. Indeed, if you not only want a good but also an SEO-friendly blog post, your text should be written in such a way that the words you want to be found for have a very prominent place. And, using your keywords too often severely damages the readability of your text. So, you definitely should not do that!

In this post, I would like to give some tips on writing blog posts that are both very readable as well as SEO-friendly. I genuinely think those two goals should (and can easily!) go hand in hand!

Elementary writing tips for good blog posts

Before anything, your blog post just has to be a good piece of writing! A lot of bloggers just begin to write after creating a new blog post. They just type what comes to mind. For some, this may be sufficient, because they are natural writing talents. Others may need some help. I always follow the next set of ‘rules’ myself.

1. Think before you write!

Think hard about the message of your text. What do you want to tell your readers? And what is the purpose of your text? What do you want you readers to do at the end of the page? Write down the answers to these questions before you begin writing.

2. Write down the structure of your blog post.

Every post should have some sort of introduction (in which you introduce your topic), a body (in which the main message is written) and a conclusion (which should summarize the most important ideas or deduce some new idea). Write down what you want to write in all these three sections. You now have some sort of summary of your post. The real writing can begin!

3. Use paragraphs.

Everybody uses paragraphs, but make sure to use paragraphs that make sense. Do not start a new sentence on a new line, just because it looks nice. There should be a reason for making a new paragraph. Every paragraph should have a main idea or a main subject. Ask yourself what the main idea of each paragraph is. You should be able to grasp that main idea in only one sentence. If you need more sentences, you simply need more paragraphs!

4. Use Headings.

If you want people to find their way in your articles, you should use subheadings. Subheadings will lead people, help them scan your page, and make the structure of your articles that much clearer.

5. Use signal words.

Signal words help people to scan through your text and help people to grasp your main idea. If you, for instance, have three reasons for wanting to sell a product, you should use signal words as: First of all, Secondly and Finally. Also, words as Nevertheless, Surely and Indeed also give a clear signal to your readers. Readers will instantly get that a conclusion will follow after words as Thus, So or Therefore. Signal words are thus very important to structure your text.

6. Let other people read your post.

Before publishing your post, let someone else read your post first. Ask him/her whether or not he understands the main idea of your post. Correct typo’s and sentences that are not formulated correctly.

Additional tips for writing an SEO-friendly blog post

These tips were taken from chapter 7 of our ebook Optimize your WordPress site.

I think you should start writing, while using the tips I mentioned above. You should never compromise the structure or the readability of your text for SEO purposes. If people like and understand your post, they are much more likely to link, tweet and share your posts. This will lead to higher ranking and more traffic. Nevertheless, without compromising on structure or readability, you can do somethings to improve your ranking even further.

1. Write rather lengthy articles.

Make sure your articles have a minimum of 300 words. As a general rule of thumb: try to put down your search terms in about 1 to 2 percent of your text. So in an article of 300 words, you should mention your search terms 3 to 6 times.

2. Use headings.

Headings are important for readability, but for SEO as well. Make sure that your keywords are used in the subheadings, but do not put your keyword in every subheading (as it will make the text unreadable). Headings help Google to grasp the main topics of a long post and thus can help in your ranking.

3. Use our WordPress SEO plugin.

Our WordPress SEO plugin actually helps you write an SEO-friendly blog post. If you want the help of our plugin you should start by choosing your focus keyword and entering it in the appropriate box. This is the most important search term you want people to find this particular page for. Our plugin actually measures many aspects of the text you are writing and helps with making your blog post SEO-friendly. We will describe the most important ones:

• The plugin allows you to formulate a meta description. This description has to be a short text which indicates the main topic of the page. If the meta description contains the search term people use, the exact text will be shown by Google underneath your URL in the search results.
• The plugin analyzes the text you write. It calculates a Flesch reading ease score, which indicates the readability of your article. The Flesch reading ease score for example takes into account the length of sentences.
• The plugin does a pretty big number of checks. It checks whether or not you used your keyword in 5 important locations: the article-heading, the title of the page, the URL of the page, the content of the article and the meta-description. The plugin also checks the presence of links in your article and the presence of images in the article. It calculates the number of words and the density of usage of the focus keyword in the article. Above that, the plugin also checks whether or not other pages on your website use the same focus keyword, to prevent you from competing with yourself.

If you write a relatively SEO-friendly blog post (based on the aspects mentioned before) the plugin will indicate this with a green bullet. Writing pages with green bullets will help you improve the ranking of the pages on your website.

Note that not every dot has to be green for the overall score to be “good”. For instance, these are the results of this post, which does have a “Good” score:

4. Add content regularly.

Adding actual and functional information to your website will give Google the idea that your website is alive. If it’s not an active website, Google will crawl it less often and it might become less appealing to Google to include the page in the search results.

Bonus tip: Link to previous content

If you already wrote some content about the topic of your current post, don’t forget to link to these posts. It will make your post stronger because you show some authority on the subject. Next to that, your link-structure is also of importance for your ranking in Google. You should read Joost his post about cornerstone articles if you want to read more about this.

Conclusion

The era in which some SEO tricks were sufficient to get your website to rank high in Google has long ended. Nowadays, good content has the highest likelihood to result in a higher positions in Google. And good content also leads to more Facebook likes and shares, tweets and return visitors to your website. Of course, you can do some extra things to maximize the SEO friendliness of your post, but most important is: just write a very, very good post!

Read more ...

How to Make Your Blog Posts SEO-Friendly

Search engine optimization is so important for marketers, but it can be a pretty tricky tactic to master with Google's copious algorithm updates. What matters, and what doesn't? What's best practice, and what's old-school? How can I remember it all, anyway? We understand this is a common issue facing inbound marketers -- and we want to help. Today, HubSpot has launched an SEO Panel that will help take you through how to optimize your blog posts as you're writing them. The SEO Panel lets you know in real-time what you need to do to optimize your posts for the keywords you care about, and what you've already succeeded in doing for your in-post SEO. Below, we'll cover some of the suggestions from the SEO Panel, along with a few other optimization tactics you should keep in mind. Note that this list does not cover every single SEO tactic. Rather, these tips are meant to get you started with improving SEO for your blog. If you're a HubSpot customer, you'll receive these reminders right in your post dashboard -- just select the SEO View. seo_panel If you're not a customer, you can use this checklist as a reminder as you blog. 1) Focus on 1-2 long-tail keywords. When writing for your blog, it's important not to stuff a ton of your keywords into a single post. Instead, focus on 1-2 keywords for each post. It's best to limit keywords to this total because 1) search engines will actually penalize your post if it looks like you're using keywords too many times, and 2) it helps keep you focused on a goal for your post. Yes, more than one keyword may appear in a post; but the goal of the post should be narrow enough to allow you to spend time optimizing for just one or two keywords. Long-tail keywords may be more efficient to use since website visitors searching long-tail terms will often be more qualified. In other words, you'll bring in the right type of traffic -- visitors who convert -- by using long-tail keywords. Where are the best parts of your posts to include these terms so you rank high in search? Well, there are four essential places where you should try to include your keywords: a) Title The title of your blog post should include your keyword, but just be sure to keep your long-tail keyword under 70 characters. The title of your post will be a search engine and reader's first step in determining the relevancy of your content, so including a keyword here is vital. b) Body You should mention your keyword at a normal pace throughout your post -- that means you should include your keywords, but only in a natural, reader-friendly way. Search engines penalize any post they believe is using keyword mentions as a way to rank for a particular keyword, so this requires close attention in the writing process. c) URL Search engines also look to your URL to figure out what your post is about. Your URL should reflect your title, so ensure the keyword you use is relevant to the article. If you have to trim your blog post URL down, make sure you keep the keyword in it. We'll elaborate on the importance of URL structures in more detail below. d) Meta Description Later in this post, we'll also dive into explaining meta descriptions. Your meta description is meant to give search engines and your readers information about your blog post's content. So be certain to use your long-tail term clearly here so Google and your audience are well aware of the post's content, but also keep in mind that how engaging the copy is matters a great deal for conversion rates. 2) Use responsive design. Blogs that are responsive will conform to the screen of any device. That means whether you're reading a blog on a desktop, smartphone, tablet, or other mobile device, the site format and layout will be the same, making for a unified user experience. Responsive design is becoming more and more important for more than just UX, though. It's also important for SEO. A recent Google study revealed 61% of mobile visitors will return to Google to find a site that is more easily readable if they can't find information on mobile sites right away. This makes having a uniform, responsive site imperative. Another reason it's important to have responsive design set up is that it creates one URL. This helps your SEO because any inbound links that come back to your site won't be scattered across different domains. Any SEO power you gain from these links will be centralized, helping Google as well as your SEO ranking. All content created on HubSpot's platform is automatically responsive, so HubSpot customers can breathe easy. 3) Include meta optimizations. Meta optimization is actually not limited to meta descriptions. To review, your meta description is the additional text that appears on your search results that lets you know what the link is about. meta-description The meta description is also important because it give readers information they need to decide whether or not your content is what they're looking for. Your meta description should include the long-tail keyword you are trying to rank for, because if we're doing blogging right, it's representative of the contents of your post. In the example above, I searched for "writing a blog post." The words "write" and "blog post" are both bolded because they were the search terms I was hoping to find. Thus, including keywords here can go a long way in helping your audience identify you as a good option in search. HubSpot customers: In the SEO Panel, you'll notice SEO Impact is measured for different elements of meta optimization (and all of the items, actually). Optimizing your metadata only takes a moment, so ideally, you'll hit all the elements of great meta optimization. seo_panel_meta_optimizations 4) Use canonical tags. You may have heard SEO experts say that you should never have duplicate content on your website. However, you sometimes need to display information in multiple ways to help your website visitors navigate your website. Whenever you have duplicate content on your website but need to keep both pages live, you should use canonical tags. Canonical tags speak to search engines and tell them which page to index. Giving them this information ensures that your content is not punished for appearing somewhere else on your website. It also allows search engines to link to the appropriate or dominant resource. To put in canonical tags: Pick the page that you want to be indexed, and write down that URL. Go to the duplicate pages that should not be indexed, and insert this code in the section: If you have any questions, follow these instructions from Google. 5) Optimize your images. Blog posts shouldn't only contain text for SEO purposes -- you should also have images that help explain your content. But search engines don't just look for images. Rather, they look for images with alt text. You can figure out an image's alt text by placing your cursor over an image. A small box will pop up that describes your image and, therefore, helps search engines interpret the meaning of the image. As you can see below, the alt text is "related-search." Think of alt text as an interpreter for search engines. Search engines cannot interpret what an image means without the text to explain it. alt_text_example In HubSpot's COS, the SEO Panel will recognize whether or not you have optimized your images. Though these elements are not as important as some other optimizations, they're still necessary (and easy to add in). image_optimizations_seo_panel 6) Don't use too many topic tags. Topic tags can help organize your blog content, but if you overuse them, they can actually be harmful. If you have too many similar tags, you may actually get dinged by search engines for having duplicate content. Think of it this way: When you create a topic tag, you also create a new page where the content from those topic tags will appear. If you use too many similar tags for the same content, it then appears to search engines as if you're showing the content multiple times throughout your website. For example, topic tags like "blogging," "blog," and "blog posts" are too similar to each other to be used on the same post. If you're worried that your current blog posts have too many similar tags, take this opportunity to clean them up. Choose about 15-25 topic tags that you think are important to your company and that aren't similar to each other. Then, only tag your posts with those keywords -- that way, you won't have to worry about duplicate content. 7) Use URL structures that help your visitors. The URL structure of your webpages should make it easy for your visitors to understand the structure of your website and what content they're about to see. Search engines favor URLs that make it easier for them and website visitors to understand the content on the page. For instance, let's take a look at Inbound Hub. There are a handful of blog sections and a lot of different posts in each one. But, the URL structure makes it easy for our readers to navigate what section and content they read. Let's take a closer look at how to properly structure your URLs by using our blog as an example: We'll start off by coming to the HubSpot blog by typing in this URL: http://blog.hubspot.com/. Now, let's say we want to head to the Marketing section. The URL would change slightly to: http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing. If we want to read the Sales section, all we have to do is change where it says "marketing" in the URL to "sales": http://blog.hubspot.com/sales. What if there's a specific article we want to read -- perhaps "How to Do Keyword Research: A Beginner's Guide"? Well, its URL will show it's an article from the Marketing section: http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-do-keyword-research-ht. The URL simply adds on an abridged version of title to the end of the post. If we wanted to look at a different blog post, the only part of the URL that would change would be after "marketing/." The structure of the URL acts as a navigation for us, letting us know where we are on the website and how to access new site pages. Search engines appreciate this, as it makes it easier for them to look at the URL and identify exactly what information searchers will access. To find more best practices for URL structure, you can read more about it from Moz. 8) Link internally when possible. Inbound links to your content help show search engines the validity or relevancy of your content. The same goes for linking internally to other pages on your website. For instance, if you've written about a topic that's mentioned in your blog post on another blog post, ebook, or webpage, you should link to that page. That will not only help retain visitors on your website, but also demonstrate the other relevant and authoritative pages to search engines. If you're a HubSpot customer, the SEO Panel suggests linking to other internal resources on your website. As you can see below, the Panel states that your overall SEO will be improved by doing this. Think of it as solving for your SEO while also helping your visitors get more information from your content. internal_link_seo_panel 9) Use the Google Webmaster tools section. A great resource for finding out more about SEO is Google's SEO section in Webmaster Tools. This page can likely provide you with answers to a number of additional questions you may have about the best ways to optimize your website, so we recommend bookmarking it. What tips do you know that can help make blog posts SEO-friendly? Share your advice below!

Read more ...