5 Steps to a

Perfectly Optimized

Blog Post

Introduction

If you've been doing your search

engine optimization (SEO) research,

you know how important maintaining

a blog can be to your website's SEO.

You've no doubt come across the

benefits of blogging for your

business in countless articles and—

not without irony, I know—in blog

posts across the web.

Introduction

Okay, you're thinking, I have to create a blog for my business site. But

will simply having a blog be enough to improve your site's SEO? If you

haven't already figured it out, here's your first lesson: never trust

anything that sounds too good to be true, especially if you've read it

on the Internet. Thinking that creating a blog is enough to improve

your SEO is like thinking that buying a notebook will make you a

successful author. No, merely creating a blog is not enough to

magically make your site the go-to resource in your industry. You can't

just write a blog: you also need to optimize it. So, how can you

optimize each blog post to maximize its SEO benefits?

Step 1:

Start with a Good Idea

Starting with a Good Idea

I'm in no mood to get into a metaphysical

debate about the nature of matter, but

that's not going to stop me from making

this next statement: you can't make

something from nothing. This adage

definitely applies to blog posts. You may

think that just having a great idea is

enough to create a successfully optimized

blog post, but in reality, a great blog post

is inspired not by a spontaneous burst of

creativity, but by keyword research.

Starting with a Good Idea

Of course, you will start each blog post with

a general idea of your topic. But you

shouldn't begin actually writing your post

until you have determined which keywords

will help you optimize it. If necessary, you

can slightly adapt your topic to fit the

appropriate keywords. This will ensure that

you can organically incorporate the

keywords into the prose, thereby avoiding

keyword stuffing and producing a more

natural experience for your reader. Creating

a great reading experience for your

audience should be your number one

priority, as the tactics involved are great for

your SEO. Besides, you want people to read

your darn blog!

Step 2:

Make it Pretty

Make it Pretty

Okay, so after doing some killer keyword research, you came

up with a great idea and wrote an awesome blog post. Now

what? It's time to dress that baby up and take it out. The first

thing you'll need? Why, a dashing title, of course! If possible,

your title should contain your keyword. You should also make

your title "clickworthy." If we humans are nothing else, we

are curious creatures. (Or is that monkeys? No matter . . . )

Pique the curiosity of the average search engine user, and

you'll find that many more visitors will stop by to check out

your blog. Now, I'm not suggesting that your blog can be

garbage with an irresistible title. I'm just saying that fun—or

at least intriguing—titles often do better than straight-to-the-

point, boring ones. That said, your reader should be able to

figure out what the post is about by reading the title. It's a

tricky balance—trust me, I know!

Make it Pretty

What else can you do to spiff up your blog post? First, you can create and

properly format relevant headings and subheadings (complete with

keywords, if possible). These are great for both your readers and search

engines, as headings make your posts easier for search engines to crawl

and categorize and easier for people to read. After you've formatted your

headings, you should add images to your post. If done properly, images

are great for SEO. Keywords can and should be part of image names and

alt text, as this will assist search engines in determining how the images

relate to your blog post, which helps to bring in the right kind of traffic. You

should also make sure your writing is completely free of errors—everyone

knows that bad grammar does not a successful blog make.

Step 3:

Link it up

Link it up

I'm sure you've already learned about the importance of inbound links for SEO.

When other sites link to your blog, they are essentially telling search engines

that you know what you're talking about and should be trusted. But did you

know that internal linking is also an effective way to boost SEO? Think of

internal links as threads in your site's web. The more threads, the more

obvious the connections are between different pages on your site. Creating

these connections also allows your user to navigate the different pages of

your site more easily. The text in which internal links are imbedded is called

anchor text. The best way to add an internal link to a blog post is to

incorporate its anchor text naturally into the prose of your blog. So, instead of

saying, "To learn more about SEO, click here," you should say, "There's a lot to

learn about SEO." Just as you want to avoid keyword stuffing, you want to

avoid using unnatural anchor text or only using your blog post's keywords as

anchor text. The anchor text should relate as closely as possible to the

content of the page to which it links while still sounding natural on the page

from which it links.

Step 4: Be Friendly

Be FriendlyOptimizing a blog post is a lot of work for one

person. Luckily, you don't have to do this job all by

yourself. Instead, you can allow your readers to

help you by sharing your post via social media.

Social sharing should be made as easy as possible

by adding social sharing icons to each post. You

should also encourage your readers to share the

material they like or find helpful. Enabling

comments on your blog posts can be another way

to improve SEO, though many factors may

contribute to your decision to enable or disable

blog post comments. The more your readers

engage with and share your content on social

media, the greater your content's reach will

become. A greater reach generally means a higher

search engine rank.

Step 5: Make it Mobile

Make it Mobile

How many people do you know who sit at their computers browsing the

Internet? Now, how many people can you think of who regularly check in on

their phones or tablets? These days, most people actually spend more time on

their mobile devices than they do on their computers. Let's say you've followed

all the advice given so far in this article, and now one of your followers has

shared your blog post on her Facebook page. Her friend, who is scrolling

through Facebook on his iPhone, clicks on the link to the post. Because it has

not been designed for mobile use, the post is either impossible or very difficult

to read. Do you think the friend of the follower is going to take the time to get

on his computer just to read that blog post? No. Will he ever read it now? Not

likely.

Make it Mobile

Guess what else recently decided it doesn't

like sites that aren't mobile friendly? Google.

Thanks to Google's newest algorithm update

, it's more important than ever to make your

blog mobile-friendly. As you probably already

know, when it comes to SEO, Google is the

boss. It doesn't matter how much you dislike

its rules—if you don't play by them, you're

out of the game. So make your blog mobile

friendly already, all right?

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