You have finally decided that you are ready to start your blog and you are looking to turn it into a lead generation option for your business, but the dreaded three letters keep showing up everywhere. 

What even is SEO?
Let’s dive into creating SEO-friendly blog posts!

It is not that scary… Search Engine Optimisation doesn’t need to be complicated.

You need to at least understand the basics of SEO if you want your blog or website to rank high on a Google search. However, SEO is really just basic common sense. What you need to do is make your blog post enjoyable for both human readers   which should be easy to do, since you are a human yourself  and search engines’ bots. Not to worry though, given their lack of human emotions, it’s very easy to think like one.

Do your keyword research when you’re creating SEO-friendly blog posts

You should be able to sum up the jist of your post in one long-tail keyword, which is just a fancy word for ‘a phrase consisting of three or more words’.

If you were breaking down the procedures to bake chocolate brownies, your keyword wouldn’t be just ‘chocolate brownie’. Your future readers are more likely to Google ‘how to make chocolate brownies’.
That’s your long-tail keyword. Keep that in mind.

Now you can find some keywords that are related . How? Just put your long-tail keyword into Google’s Keyword Planner or Moz’s Keyword Explorer and you’ll see what users usually type when searching for the same topic (e.g. ‘How to make chocolate brownies without eggs’). It is that simple.

Integrate keywords organically into your blog post

Your blog post needs to flow smoothly. Resist the urge to shove all the long-tail keywords one after the other without creating an actual meaningful paragraph.

You must sprinkle them strategically – in the blog title, the URL, headings, meta descriptions and image names, as well as repeating them organically in the body of the article.

You still need to write quality content

Yes, you are here to learn how to please those little bots, but remember, at the end of the day, it’s not them who are going to share your blog post or subscribe to your newsletter – it’s the actual humans!

Your post must bring value to your readers. After reading it, they should always walk away with something valuable.

Make it scannable

Would you still read a post that was one big sentence with no line breaks or paragraphs? Probably not. And honestly I don’t blame you – you simply haven’t got the time, and neither have your readers.

You need to make your blog post easy to scan so that they can figure out whether it’s the answer to what they were looking for, and bots can find it easily.

Optimize images when creating SEO-friendly blog posts

You have found the perfect pictures to go with your blog post. That’s excellent! Your readers are going to be very impressed, but I’m afraid bots can’t see them, even if there’s text in the image.

What they can see, though, is their name. So ditch any lazy ‘image09.jpg’ and use relevant keywords instead.

Add a call to action

I’m going to assume that you wouldn’t want your readers to only read your post and then forget about it for the rest of their lives. You may want them to comment, share, subscribe to your email list, or follow you on social media.

Then go ahead and add a question at the end to encourage discussion, have some ‘share’ buttons, link to older posts,  or ask them to subscribe to your email if they enjoyed your blog post.

The more people interact with your blog post and navigate your website, the higher you are going to rank in the long term.

Your title should hook the reader in. For example, you can use long-tail keywords to state exactly what the blog post is going to offer (e.g. ‘How to bake eggless chocolate brownies’

You could ask a question, or state something controversial or unusual that your readers will want to check out. 

List articles perform very well, especially when they include numbers or, even better, odd numbers  (e.g. ‘43 one pot meals).

Naturally I don’t expect that you incorporate all of these lessons right away. But, as your website starts to grow, so should your goals on ranking higher in search engines. Once you figure out the goals of your readers, you’ll be on track to deliver consistent and valuable content that will climb the ranks.

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