Blog SEO: How to Write Search Engine Friendly Blog Posts

The dream of every blogger is to create content that will drive traffic, bring in lots of viewers and turn website visitors into paying customers.

Unfortunately, this dream does not ever get to happen for most blog posts.

In fact; according to a popular research, more than 90 percent of all blog posts created online do not ever get search traffic from Google.

Now, considering that creating content usually takes a lot of effort, time and other resources, instead of creating content that will get ignored, it is better to avoid creating such posts altogether.

So, how can you create content that will be read online?

Instead of relying on guess work, the most profitable way to be compensated for time spent in creating a blog post is to create posts that will be visible for both humans and the search engine. Doing this will get you both readers and website visitors.

How you can do this?

In this post, I am going to walk you through the 7 steps you can use to create content that will attract viewers and blog visitors to your website.

I have listed each of these steps below and we will discuss them one after the other…

• Identify your readers and their needs
• Do a Keyword Research
• Create great content
• Optimize your technical SEO and Meta Tags
• Get the right back links   
• Promote your Posts
• Keep things updated and relevant

Now, let’s discuss each of these individually.

Identify your readers and their Needs

Every content you create on your blog is all about the reader you want to attract to the blog.

This is the crucial thing you need to know, if you really want to create a successful blog.

Understanding your average target reader and their specific need(s) is very crucial when it comes to creating content that attracts a large volume of search.

And the first step to create content that matters to anyone is to clearly identify the person that the content will matter to; which in this case is your target reader.

Find out what they need

As soon as you identify your target reader, the next thing you want to do is to find out their problems. Or put differently, the things they will most likely want to search for, on the search engines.

When you get the data about these things, your next responsibility is to provide solutions to these problems, by creating relevant content, around these important search terms.

If you follow these steps, you’re not only going to create more relevant posts, you will get to provide real time solutions to other people’s real needs. Doing this is one of the smart ways to make money off your content.

Do a Keyword Research

After identifying your target audience; in order to clearly understand their needs, you will need to know the things they are searching on the internet, the terms they use and the volume of searches generated for each search term. This is where a keyword research comes in.

What is keyword research?

Simply put, Keyword Research is the art of understanding the important search metrics and search terms used by your target audience and using such data to create relevant content that will matter to your target audience.

Why is Keyword research important?

With data from a comprehensive keyword research, you will get to know about the number of other people who are already creating the solution (or content), you have in mind.

You will also get an idea about your ability to create content that will perform better than other existing content. These things are crucial if you want to create an SEO optimized blog post.

With such knowledge, you can then decide if it’s worthwhile to go ahead and target a particular kind of keyword with your content or try a different one. This will remove a lot of guess work from your content creation process, giving you the chance to create better performing content

Keyword tools for SEO optimized Posts

Like I already mentioned above, understanding and conducting a good keyword research is very necessary, if you want to write a an SEO optimized blog post.

That said, there are some important keyword research tools that will be very useful for your blog. This includes; Google Keyword tool, Ubersuggest, Keywordtool.io among others. Some of these tools are completely free and using them will be very helpful in your keyword research.

Create Great Content

Content writing is at the core of online marketing and SEO. In fact, according to a research, companies that blog get about 67 percent higher returns on investment than those companies that don’t.

Generally, websites who update their blogs at intervals are more likely to get more visitors to their platforms and subsequently paying customers.

But, beyond content writing, creating effective content is a very important SEO strategy that will help you, if you really want to evolve a successful blog.

What is an effective Content?

An effective content or blog post is the kind of content that is able to drive the kind of result you had in mind, as at the time you set out to write the content.

For your content to be effective or result driven, the content has to be well written, addressed to meet the needs of a specified audience, well detailed and written in a language your audience can understand.

Now, let’s talk briefly about this..

How to write an effective Content

To be able to write out an effective content, you have to go back to some of the things we mentioned earlier.

For instance, you need to know your target audience clearly, understand their needs, and have an idea about the competition, including the chances you have to create the kind of content that will be visible.

You can get to know about these through a keyword research, like I mentioned in step two above.

As soon as you’re done with the keyword research, you can then go on to create a well-researched and value added content for your audience then work on promoting same aggressively.

Optimize your technical SEO and Meta Tags

It’s hard to succeed on Content Marketing without creating content that is visible on the search engine.

This is why beyond other forms of search engine optimizations you create, you also need to optimize your technical SEO and meta tags, if you really want to create a search engine friendly content.

What is technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to all the technical parts of search engine optimizations that need to be put in place so that your websites can be visible on the internet. This includes things like website speed, crawling, links etc.

Specifically, to improve your technical SEO you need to make your website faster, make sure your web pages are indeed and crawled by search engine bots, ensure there are no broken links and that all your meta tags are search engine optimized.

What are Meta tags?

Meta tags are important snippets of text that provide data about a page’s content to the search engine.

Put differently, Meta tags (specifically, meta description attribute) describe the content of your web page to the search engine and sometimes, your website visitor.

For the fact that your meta tag tells the search engine what your web page or blog post is all about, it is very important you get the meta description attribute for each blog post at the right place, otherwise; a lot of things might go wrong.

A plugin like Yoast SEO, or All in One SEO and Rank Maths SEO are reputable plugins that provide an option for you to impute the data for your meta description attribute, for each blog post.

Although all meta tags don’t help in SEO, getting the important meta tags like title tags, meta description etc. optimized with the right keywords and most important elements of your content can improve your chances for a better search engine visibility and ranking.

Get the right Back links

Back links are links from other websites to your website. Usually, back links are important indicators of the importance of a post.

The idea behind back links are that people will like to reference (or link to) a content they feel is good. And for that reason, search engines like Google give relevance to posts, based on the number of other websites that links to such posts.

But, the catch about back linking is that recently, it is not just about the links anymore.

Right now, a lot of emphasis is placed on the quality of the websites linking to a particular blog post, than the total number of links to the post.

What this means is that; while it is a good SEO strategy to have back links to your blog posts and web content, it is also very important you get these links from relevant websites and websites with a good search engine ranking and authority.

Of course if your website is relatively new, it can get rather difficult to generate back links from majority of the reputable websites.

But, you can always start your link building campaign through guest blogging or other approach from other medium to average ranking websites and then work your way upward towards other higher ranking websites.

In any case, while working on building your backlinks, always remember that writing a search engine friendly blog post demands that you get the right kind of links (preferably do-follow links), on the right key words, from the right kind of websites.

Promote your Posts

As a content creator, you might be tempted to create content, upload it on your blog and then move on.

Usually, I don’t blame anyone if this happens. Because content marketing is really time demanding. So, you’ll need to invest a lot of time and effort to get things to really work.

But, to be very realistic too, content thrives on promotion. The more you share and promote your blog post, the more your target audience gets to see and possibly, interact with it.

And yes, you can’t get a lot out of your posts without promoting them.

To show you how much importance is placed on Content Promotion, when it comes to boosting content visibility, established content creators and bloggers work hard to push through their content all the time.

Right from social media to influencer platforms etc. You can’t afford to be left out, if you want to create contents that stand out.

How to promote your blog posts for visibility

Promoting your content is very important for visibility and engagement. There are so many ways to promote your content online.

Some of these promotion strategies includes; Guest posting or writing on other blogs, sharing on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc., Joining Blogging Communities on platforms like Quora, Reddit, Facebook etc.

Besides this, you can also use email promotional strategy, influencer marketing etc.

The most important thing about promoting your content is that you should focus on promoting relevant and valuable content to the right audience if you want to get better results.

Keep things Updated

There was a time that it was okay to create content, update it on your blog and forget about it forever. Now things have changed a bit.

Updating your content and keeping things relevant and up to date is very important especially if you’re building a website with evergreen content.

Reason for this is because, in some industry (or niches) information changes very rapidly.

And for this reason, some information that must have been relevant months ago while you created a particular content might not be relevant after some months.

Instead of allowing this irrelevant information to remain on your website, you need to update your posts, to change them from time to time. This has its own way of affecting your SEO.

Again, besides the general updates for your blog posts, it is important that at some intervals, you update and add some paragraphs, sections to an existing blog post that is ranking well on the search engine or re-write them altogether where necessary.

Reason you’re doing this is because search engine algorithms like Google’s prefer fresh content over outdated post.

So, it’s easier for a recently written content to be given a better ranking over yours, if there’s a presumption that your post is outdated, due to the time it was written.

Final Words

As a content marketer, you will realize that it can be pretty much easy to write and update contents on your blog but, succeeding in Content Marketing without search engine optimized content is almost entirely impossible.

With what you’ve learned so far today, if you begin to put these into practice, you will realize that you will begin to write SEO optimized and Search engine friendly posts.

And beyond that, you will also gain more experience and learn even better ways to gain search visibility and drive more traffic, to your website.

As usual, if you find any of these to be difficult or you need a better result for your website, our SEO experts can help you implement an SEO campaign that will give you more visibility and improved website visits.  

Now, it’s over to you. Which of these have you used as part of your SEO strategies? Let’s hear you.