Have you wondered how to write a blog post that is SEO friendly?
When adding a blog post or news article to your website, as well as making it interesting to the person reading it, you also want to make it easy for Google (and other search engines) to find it.
This will increase visitor traffic to that page and then hopefully to your website in general.
In this blog post we’ll share with you some hints and tips to help you to write an SEO friendly blog post.
Before you start writing
When writing a blog post it’s important to have an overall search phrase (what people type into search engines) in mind.
The easiest way to come up with this is to ask yourself the question :
What do people put into search engines if they are looking for this article?
If you can’t think of this yourself, try asking your colleagues, customers or people in your network.
Ideally you would have a different search phrase for each post you do, as search engines tend to not like duplicate content.
For example, for this article we based it around the phrase “How to write an SEO friendly blog post“.
Have a structure
One idea is to split your blog post into different parts and define the structure for it.
Splitting a blog post into various parts can make writing easier and also means you don’t have to write it all in one go.
It also makes it easier to read as people prefer short sections rather than lots of long paragraphs.
Number of words needed for a blog post
The ideal number of words to write is between 500 and 1,000. If you struggle with this, then we recommend at least 250 words.
As well as being more interesting to the reader, this will give search engines more content to scan and it is more likely for them to highlight it as an article worth reading.
In terms of blog posts, quality is definitely better than quantity, i.e. having a detailed well thought out blog post once a month is much better than posting two short posts each week.
How to use the search phrase in your blog
Try to make sure the search phrase (and different variations of it) appear 2 or 3 times throughout the article, and ideally in the title and in the first sentence.
However, it’s also important not to seem too forced or false with this, i.e. try not to put too many keywords in the article just because you think search engines want that. This can make the article hard to read and search engines dislike this.
Use of titles and subtitles
The main page title for a blog is known as the H1 title. Subtitles are known as H2 and these should be used to help break up the article as well as some of them containing variations on the key phrase.
Add an image
If it works well with the article, add an image (or more than one) to help with the visual impact of the article. When uploading the image to your blog post, set the “alt tag” for the image to your chosen search phrase.
We recommend that the image is also set as the “featured image” for the blog post. This means that when the article is shared on social media, this image is shown on the link as featured images tend to need to be a minimum of 1200 pixels wide.
Finally when uploading images, use compression software or similar to make sure the image size is small enough to not impact on how quickly the page loads.
Include an outbound link
When writing a blog post that is SEO friendly, it can be useful to include links to other websites.
We might, for example, include a link to a professional copywriter we work with. If you can then get the owner of that website to reciprocate by linking back to your article then that can help with search engine rankings.
Use your own voice
Part of the reason for a blog post is for potential clients to find out more about you. By writing the article in your own “voice” to match your branding and personality, you can really help with this.
If you don’t enjoy writing or find you don’t have the time, we also recommend you consider employing a professional copywriter to help with this. For some of our clients we offer regular blog posts written by a copywriter as part of an ongoing package.
URL, meta title and meta description
One way to help search engines find your article is to make use of the SEO tags on a post.
The URL is the link for the post itself. This article we have set to “silverwebsites.co.uk/news/seo-friendly-blog-post” making sure it includes the key words from the search phrase but without being too long.
The meta title should contain the search phrase and for this blog we set ours to “How to write an SEO friendly blog post – Silver Websites”.
The meta description is the short description displayed on the post by search engines as part of their preview. Again it’s important for this to include your search phrase and to also act as an enticing summary for potential visitors to want to click on the link.
Include internal links
When writing an article it can be useful to include links to other parts of the website. Here is a link to our contact page so you can get in touch, and here is a link to our web design portfolio page so you can see examples of our work.