Writing because of search engine marketing purposes do be challenging yet time consuming. However, it’s period properly spent, as like search engine marketing helps to us office higher within the search engines.

How do you make an SEO-friendly blog post, ye would possibly ask? Using a step-by-step web optimization checklist, concerning course! By the end on that article, you’ll know precisely whether according to make up search instrument friendly weblog posts. So, commend such a good read!
Writing

Setup Website/Blog

The first step in creating a well-optimized blog post is to make sure you website is correctly set for SEO. This is something that you will do only once, but it does depend on the platform you’re website is built on.

In the checklist, you can find this section in a separate sheet/tab, at the bottom of the screen. Make sure you take a look before you start writing.

Mobile Friendly:


Ensure your website is mobile friendly using the Google Mobile Friendly Test Tool. Google tends to rank sites lower if they are not optimized for mobile platforms, so make sure you fix this issue.

More than 50% of all web traffic has migrated to mobile devices in the past couple of years. This means that most of your readers will be on mobile devices as well.

Look for a responsive theme/template or use relative values instead of absolute ones in your code.

Site Is Indexable:

If your site can’t be found by Google and listed into the search engine results, you’re also wasting your time.

Problems that lead to bad indexing are usually related to the NoIndex meta tag, or the robots.txt file. Make sure the pages you want indexed are not blocked in any way. Also, ensure that extra pages you don’t really need in the search engine are blocked.

To block a page, simply edit your robots.txt file:

Check Site Speed:

The speed at which your website loads is very important for your business. If your users don’t see the content fast, they will abandon the page. There are two big factors that determine speed: the server on which the website runs, and the content that must be loaded.

Use Google PageSpeed Insights to determine if there are any issues with your website’s server and structure. Another great tool to do this is GT Metrix.


Install SEO Plugins:

If you’re using a popular CMS such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal, you can make your site easy to optimize by installing a plugin. These plugins will help you optimize your content’s key elements (title, meta description) a lot easier. It will also fix some SEO issues commonly found on different platforms.

Some suggestions are: Yoast SEO and All in one SEO Pack for WordPress, Easy Frontend SEO for Joomla, and SEO Tools for Drupal.

Install Social Sharing Plugins:

Writing a good article is nothing without promotion. Chances of writing something that will go viral on its own are very small. If you’re using one of the popular CMS mentioned above, you should also install a social sharing plugin.

Some good examples are Fast Social Share for Joomla and WP Social Share for WordPress. There are many options out there, so make your pick based on design and user reviews.

These plugins will help readers share the content and make it more popular. As you probably know, social media is one of the biggest marketing channels out there. It would be a complete waste not to take advantage of it!



Readability:

Your blog posts should be easy to read. First, make sure your text is easy to understand. Have short sentences, and try to make the paragraphs shorter in width.

Ensure your background color doesn’t conflict with the font color. Some combinations make it harder for the user to read your posts.

The best combination for legibility is usually black text on white or light gray background. However, you can use different combinations to express different things.

We recommend that the paragraphs are 11-12 pixels in size. Also, keep a hierarchical structure in your headings. H1 should be the biggest, H2 smaller and so on.

Last but not least, place ads smartly, without spamming the user. Avoid random pop-ups or pop-ups that appear as soon as you access the page.




Customizable Elements and Meta-Tags:


The post title and meta tags are two important elements that display in Google’s search results.

Make sure you can easily edit these elements. The page/blog post should also display a H1 tag containing the title of the article. Usually it’s the same as the title tag, but this is not mandatory.

Just like the post title, it should include keywords and be captivating. There should only be one H1 tag on your page. Other important meta are rel=”canonical” and rel=”prev/next”.

Canonical tags are used to solve duplicate content issues . If your page has comments, for example, some platforms create separate URLs ending in “/?replytocom=123#”. This can create conflicts between pages in the SERPS.

The canonical tag should point out what page you want to be displayed in Google. If the page has a self-referencing canonical tag, then all the comments’ URLs will point to the main page.

In case you have paginated content (on a blog page for example), you should use the previous/next meta tag. This technique can be used for guides separated in multiple pages.






2. Perform Keyword Research


Doing keyword research before writing a blog post can maximize the potential organic traffic you get from search engines. First of all, think of what your readers might be searching in order to find your content.

You can use the Google Keyword Planner to get an idea of what people are searching for. Another thing you can do is start typing keywords in Google and get ideas from the suggestions shown there.

Or, you can take it a step further and use the cognitiveSEO Keyword Tool.

It will show you search volume, keyword difficulty and top competitors ranking for specific keywords. The keyword suggestions there are the most relevant to your main keyword from an SEO perspective.