How to setup for SEO friendly blog posts

Ever wondered how to setup an SEO friendly blog post? Establishing the basics for good SEO is easier to do yourself than you might think. It’s no secret that Google loves great content. An interesting and regularly updated blog can work wonders for a website’s search engine optimisation. So here are some easy steps to ensure that your blog content not only gets picked up by the search engines, but ranks over and above that of competitors?

Keyword Research

The first step is to conduct keyword research around the topic of your blog post, to identify high-volume keyword targets that can be integrated. One of the best free tools on the internet for this is KeywordTool.io. You’ll want to choose a primary (and potentially secondary) keyword target that encompasses the theme of your post, but that also attracts decent average monthly search volumes.

Tags

Once you’ve identified the keywords you would like the blog post to rank for, it’s time to integrate these targets into the SEO tags and content of the post. At a bare minimum it’s best to aim for 350+ words, as content that does not meet this target runs the risk of being flagged as having a low text to html ratio.

You’ll want to incorporate your target keywords not only into the title of the post, but also into the heading tags used throughout the article. It’s best practice to include the primary keyword in the <h1> heading tag, of which there should only be one per page. Similar keywords can also be included in sub-headings (i.e. <h2> and <h3> tags), provided that they’re relevant.

You’ll also want to include them into the blog post’s SEO tags – namely the title tag and the meta description tag. These tags will be displayed as the title and description of your article in the search engine results pages, and are therefore extremely important.

Your primary keyword target should feature at the start of the title tag, followed by the secondary keyword and then your brand name (each separated by a ‘|’ symbol). Title tags should be no more than 60 characters, after which they are automatically truncated.

The meta description tag needs to contain no more than 155 characters for the same reason, and should also contain the primary keyword target as close to the start of the description as possible. The description should be a short summary of what the article covers, with an incentive to click through included.

First Paragraph

Target keywords should also be included in the first paragraph of content. The primary keyword in particular should be as close to the start of the content as possible. Mentioning the keyword or synonyms an additional 2-3 times throughout the content can assist in reinforcing the theme.

Internal and External Links

Aiming to include 2 – 3 links within your content to relevant internal or external resources can demonstrate that your article is well-researched. Internal links with keyword-targeted anchor text can help to boost rankings for internal pages, while external links to thematically relevant websites can help to associate your brand with industry experts.

Monitoring and Reporting

Once you’ve published your blog post, add the target keywords to your position tracking and monitor it’s progress over time. Should your article not begin to rank, it’s time to get busy building relevant links back to your article.

Want to get started with optimising your blog but not sure how? Get in touch with ADMATIC today to find out how we can help.