How to Write SEO-friendly Blog Posts [2021 Update]

Confusion still persists in the majority of people while writing an SEO-friendly blog.

There are times when people find it difficult writing blogs for SEO purposes, and for writing to lure the audiences to bring them to you. These two things seem to be utterly difficult tasks. Well, my thoughts are quite different from this. If you wish to have an SEO-friendly blog, then it is a must to have your keywords in a prominent place. In case you end up over-using keywords, it will definitely affect the readability of your blog. To improve such small mistakes, make sure to read these tips for SEO-friendly blogs.

Creating an SEO friendly blog post is a skill itself. Anyone interested in learning about it can take up this task. In order to create some engaging and user-friendly blogs, you’ll need to do a lot of hard work along with some practice.

What do you mean by an SEO-friendly blog post?

An SEO-friendly blog post is the one that helps search engines in understanding your content. Besides this, it’s also the one that is curated for humans. It refers to making people come and click on your title, secondly, managing to keep readers on your page for a longer period, last but not the least, ensuring to answer the queries of each visitor on your page.

Generally, people have a notion that there are several secrets for writing SEO-friendly blog posts. Well bursting this bubble, there is no such secret for writing SEO-friendly blog posts. All you need to do is follow the important steps for making a blog SEO friendly. These steps may consist of the subheading, the overall structure of the blog, text format, and paragraphs.

Are you still waiting for answers to how to creating an SEO-friendly blog post?

Here we bring you a blog with some amazing tips for writing SEO-friendly blogs. Two things you should keep in mind while writing an SEO-friendly blog: Easy to understand and SEO-friendliness.

Tips For Writing SEO-friendly Blog Post

1. Never Skip Research

It is utterly essential to opt for keyword research before writing any new blog post. Always keep in mind your aim of writing a blog post which is answering your user’s query and ranking higher on Google.

For a user, a query is something that they ask Google. But for a content writer, it is straightaway your keyword. While picking the keyword, make sure you pick the one with at least 100 search volume. It can also be between 500 to 1000. 

A majority of people who are well-versed with the overall concept of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) understand that a SEO-friendly blog has the power to attract higher traffic. With this, it becomes totally essential to find some appropriate topics and ensure to add them to your SEO blog post.

Before writing a blog, I always read some articles that will keep me informed about the latest trends in Content Marketing, Digital Marketing and SEO. If I come across something interesting, I ensure to save that particular link.

I never fail to make a blog schedule. While I’m making it, I add some useful links to it and the topics that could help reach the goal for the blog calendar of a month. If you don’t have enough time to do this, then you can also hire an SEO agency for doing it on your behalf.

2. Make Sure to Understand Your User’s Search Intent

Everyone wants to be on Page 1 of Google. But no one wants to understand their user’s search intent. This is where the problem lies, the process of being on Page 1 starts with understanding what your users are searching for. It is widely known as Search Intent.

I’ll explain in detail here:

Suppose you’re about to write a blog post on ‘Photo Editing’. Before writing this blog, you must ensure to know the search intent behind that particular keyword. It is one of the most advanced SEO tricks for blogs.

So you go to Google and type in ‘Photo Editing’. If you find that there is no such information on the page of Google. Then you’ll have to search for some other keywords relating to the same keyword.

Due to these reasons, it becomes relevant that understanding search intent is the first step to write a SEO-friendly blog.

3. Create a Well-Structured Format  

An SEO-friendly blog post is the one with amazing content and proper blog structure along with different ideation in various parts of the blog. You must always prepare your blog structure before writing the actual blog post. Doing so will be highly beneficial. 

An SEO-friendly blog post has a proper structure as follows:

• An Introduction
• A Body
• A Conclusion

These three sections will make your blog post easier to read and understand for the audiences. Not only that, but it will also increase the chances of your blog ranking on Page 1 of search engines. Once you’ve made this structure, you can initiate the writing process.

4. Write Short Paragraphs 

While writing your blog post, always use paragraphs. But not everyone has the skill of using them in the right way. Even if your content is good, the readers will never be interested in reading longer paragraphs.

Before creating the paragraphs of your blog post, always think about the main idea behind it. Work on the skill of summarizing your idea in a single sentence. One of the tips for SEO-friendly blogs is to highlight the important points from your blog post.

5. Add Headings

Having a proper heading will help your users in understanding the specific parts of your blog post. If you still wish to help them in navigating the overall blog post, add subheadings to your blog post. It will also enhance the structure of your blog. While people think it’s just about readability, it’s also about Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

6. Use Transition Words 

Transition words are one of those words that make it easier for users to read your blog post. The reason why they are called transition words is that they help the readers jump from one topic to another. Transition words are the ones such as ‘Finally’, ‘Secondly’, ‘Currently’ etc. 

Transition words will help you make an amazing relationship with the reader. Suppose if you want to tell your readers that its conclusion then you can use words like ‘in short’. With this, it becomes utterly essential to use transition words for adding structure to your text.

If you don’t use transition words then moving from one topic to another will not seem smooth. It might seem quite frictional. Last but not the least, transition words also make your blog post more SEO-friendly.

7. Optimize Image and Alt Tag

One of the best ways to enhance your blog post is to work on the quality of your images and videos. Some people think that search engine crawlers don’t give importance to the images when it comes to SEO.

With this, most of the people have started working on their images to make them SEO-friendly. Doing so will help your blog post by improving its ranking on the search engines.

One of the interesting tips for SEO-friendly blogs is that you’ll find it easier to rank on the image searches when compared to the text. Surprisingly, it has the power to bring a humongous amount of traffic to your blog post.

Some Essential Details Regarding Images:

Ensure that your images are of small file size. The size should not be more than a few hundred kilobytes. 

One of the main causes behind slow loading pages or websites is large images. Remember that page loading time is also a ranking factor.

While optimizing your images, make sure to check that your image dimensions are not larger than the size of the displayed image.

8. Keep Your Blog Posts Long Enough

Before writing your blog post, always remember that your blog must be of at least 300 words. Google is a search engine that loves long articles. But as you know we write not just for search engines, but for our readers too. That’s why the blog post should not be too long that petrifies our readers.

In my understanding, you should only attempt writing a long blog post when you’re a skilled writer. In this time where everything is fast and rapid, it’s quite a lot to ask our reader to read such lengthy blog posts. So make sure that every word of it is worth their precious time.

If you’re still not sure about the length of your blog post, then according to the research by SEO website Backlinko the average length of a blog post that ranks on Page #1 of Google is 1,890 words. One of the major reasons for writing a long blog post is that it has more topical authority than the shorter blog posts.

Another tip for creating an SEO-friendly blog is to always add focus keywords in your entire blog post.

9. Include Internal and External Link

One of the best ways to add value to your blog post and also improve its ranking is by adding internal and external links. These links can be added to your blog posts that are on your own website. It works wonders in helping search engines discover new pages on your website.

Generally, a blog post must always have an internal link in it. With an internal link on your blog pots, readers are bound to be hooked for a longer period. Besides this, Internal links also help in creating a website’s site architecture which is quite important for SEO.

Moving on to External links, these links make sure that readers are directed to relevant blog posts written by other people on various websites. While it may shorten the time a reader would spend on your blog post, it will definitely get you on the domain authority of other industry expert bloggers. Not only that, but it will also help you in getting high-quality backlinks

External links are ‘do follow’ or ‘no follow’. Which one should you use?

A ‘no follow’ tag must be used in situations like – Paid links, Advertisements & Sponsored links, and Links in comments or on forums.

10. Create a Captivating SEO Title

A SEO title is nothing more than the title of your article that you see in the search results.

Your SEO title is basically made up of two things:

Firstly, it should be accurate. The search engine will not rank your website or page if the title does not perfectly describe the contents of the page.

Secondly, it has to be compelling enough. Users are bound to click on search results that promise them solutions to their problems.

A good SEO title is the one with:

Your focus keyword.

A power word. These words have the ability to trigger an emotional response in the reader. 

11. Make an appealing Meta Description

One of the most important tips for an SEO-friendly blog is to have an appealing meta description. But what is it?

Meta Description refers to a text of two to three lines in the meta description tags. It works as something that tells the search engine about your blog post.

If you’re someone who uses Yoast SEO plugin, then your meta description field might look like this:

A meta description is something that tells your readers as to why they must give a read to your blog post.

While creating a meta description remember these three things:

• It is of utmost importance to have a blog post format.
• The blog post formats can keep your readers engaged.
•  If you want your readers to convert, then use blog post formats.

12. Update Your Content Regularly

It is utterly essential to keep adding new blog posts to your website. This particular activity will make sure that your website is active. If it is active, then there are higher chances of Google crawling it.  Ensure to add this activity to your content strategy to improve your website’s rankings. 

Remember, don’t post just because you need to. Create high-quality, informative content. Only well-written blog posts that fit the reader’s search intent rank high on the search engine. If you’re someone who doesn’t have the time to post every day or every week, then you must opt for a calendar.

Writing and posting blog posts regularly will make your readers come and read your blogs. Besides this, you will also give a tough competition to your competitors.

13. Apply Related Keywords

There are times when a blog post seems an amazing read, but still, something doesn’t fit right. This problem is none other than keyword stuffing. If you stuff your blog post with just one focus keyword, then it is going to bore both your readers and Google.

Google is getting smarter with each passing day and it wants you to create content that is loved by all. It wants you to avoid using a single focus keyword everywhere in your blog post. To solve this problem, you must make use of related keywords. This is one of the ways how Google understands your topic by looking at the related keywords other than the focus keyword.

One of the most amazing SEO-friendly content writing tips is that you must always make use of related keywords throughout your blog post.

14. Create a Correct URL

One of the SEO-friendly content writing tips is to create a proper URL. Let’s dive in, to know more about URLs.

The term URL refers to the underlined link that is read by your readers and appears on the SERP. It is a way to reach your blog post. URL has two main importance, one it is an SEO ranking factor, second, it is also significant for User Experience.

Talking further about URL, it is auto-generated by your CMS (Content Management System) based on the title of the blog post. You also have the option to change the permalink manually from your CMS settings to make sure that the URL is understandable. 

While you’re creating your URL, you must use your keyword in the URL itself for better optimization.

15. Shorter the Sentences, Better the Results

If you wish to make your blog post easier to read, then you must use shorter sentences. It will keep your audiences on your blog for a longer time. It is advisable to keep your sentences short with at least 10 to 15 words.

As audiences stay longer on your page, it will increase your ‘time on page’, a metric that search engines keep a watch on. So, short sentences are the most impactful ways of writing SEO friendly articles.

Conclusion

The days when only SEO tricks could help your website or its pages rank on Google have absolutely vanished. In today’s time, the only thing that works is Quality Content. This content is capable of getting a higher number of shares, tweets, links, and readers.

These tips for SEO-friendly blog posts will definitely help you in answering the queries of your reader/users. Once you know the search intent, you’re bound to create amazing content for your readers.