Are you leveraging the profit potential of your blog posts? If you are simply writing content for your blog without any regard for optimization and readability, you are leaving potential right on the table.
With a few steps, you can give your readers and the search engines exactly what they want.
1. Find a Unique Topic
Think about a topic that will compel your blog readers to share your content. Make it creative and unique. Here are some quick tips to finding topics:
- Ask! Ask your readers what they want to read.
- Research forum sites and Q&A platforms like LinkedIn groups or Quora to see what people are asking in your industry.
- What are your readers’ needs? Research on Twitter, Facebook or any other social site to determine what problems need to be solved in your industry.
- Spy on other related blogs and sift through the comments to discover trends.
- News is always a welcomed topic because it is “hot off the presses”. The quicker you can report the story, the better. For example, I wrote an article a little while ago entitled: Will SEO be Dead in 6 Months? It discussed breaking, controversial news about Google and generated quite a buzz.
2. Keyword Research
Write your blog around specific keywords. Not just any keywords, but those for which people are looking. If your keyword is only searched by 12 people a month, it’s time to move on. You can use the Google Keyword Tool for your research. If the search value and competition is high, you will have found a good keyword that will interest people. Devise one main keyword and two or three variations for each post.
Tip: Don’t get hung up with this step. If you have an idea for a blog post and you are having a hard time fitting in an exact keyword, write the post anyways if you know your audience will love it. You can do more keyword research for your next post. Focus on value first.
Important: Make sure your keywords are aligned with your audience’s needs. Don’t write about selling to businesses if your audience sells goods to consumers.
3. Write the Blog Post
Write as an authority who is teaching your readers worthwhile information. Write in a conversational tone and avoid selling.
New marketers: If you are just starting, it can be hard to imagine yourself an expert. What you must understand is that everyone is an expert at something. Whether you are a parent, a spouse, a gardener or even a great cook, you have a story to tell. Infuse your expertise throughout your writing and over time you will feel more apt to teach others. If you feel like you are an authority inside, it will come across in your posts and you will be respected as such.
4. Easy to Read
Headlines make every blog post easier to read. They also enclose copy into well-organized sections.
If you remember anything from this article, remember this…internet users have short attention spans so your blog content must be extremely readable. Short paragraphs, headlines and sub-headlines will help to break up your content into sections.
If your paragraphs are more than 5-6 sentences long, you risk losing a reader.
Use bullet points, bold, italics and underlines throughout to add emphasis where needed. Add images, screenshots, infographics or videos to attract the reader’s attention.
5. Optimize
Use your main keyword in the title and throughout your post. You can add emphasis to your keywords by using them for H1 and H2 tags, in your title, alt tags for images and as alt text for links.
Internal linking – By linking to this old post on Site-Reference, How to Write Blog Posts that Keep Your Readers Coming Back for More, I am not only referring the reader to more valuable information, but I am also creating a keyword specific internal link. These links (1-2 per post) will help your content in the search engines.
6. Share
You don’t need anyone to tell you to share your content. Let your valuable work be known. Offer it on your social medial profiles and post it on relevant blogs without spamming. Make sure your blog post includes sharing buttons so your readers can easily share it with others. Your posts should also be available via RSS feed.
7. Track
Monitor your readership over time. You will find certain trends, like which posts do better than others and to what type of content your readers respond. Blog optimization is a work in progress and a dynamic that occurs over a period of time. Pay attention to how your blog moves, optimize your posts, and stay on top of what your audience wants. This is a recipe for blog posting success.
9 Comments on "7 Steps to Optimizing Your Blog Post for Google and People"
Very sound advise for a solid foundation. It is always good to rehear these pointers so that they will not be forgotten.
I think in searching for the keywords, you must go with the google insights tool. It really helps in deciding the keywords and the hot topics which will attract visitors for sure.
To track your performance, Google Analytics is a perfect choice and provides a lot of info about what’s happening inside your blog. Another great tool is a WordPress plugin called Counterize! It’s easy, fast, and precise.
As explained in this post, measuring your performance is the most important part of your work that must not be forgotten. Without it,you won’t know what you’ve done and how successfully you’ve conducted your writing work.
Rahman Mehraby
TravList
The internal linking part of your optimization tip is good one. This is the most ignored thing i guess in the internet marketing subject. Internal linking not only provides your visitor with the ease of moving on with reading but also helps in ranking improvement, specially, as you mentioned, you always use keywords to link internally.
Finding a topic is the most important, My favorite is the building of internal links between blog posts. Very good for SEO and underestimated by bloggers.
Internal linking has help for us, for my website i use ALRP plugin for increase internal link. its good for google search engine
This is a nice overview of link building. I try to do at least one and usually two internal links for each of my blog posts. Also, I am amazed at how good guest blog posts are at not only getting readers to your blog, but also having other sites link to your guest post. I have to work more on using “Alt” tags for photos, since I use photos in all my posts. I really like your idea of using a variety of things such as bullet points, bold, italics and underlines throughout the article for emphasis and to keep the readers eye with different things in the post — great idea I will use it in future posts.
can please anyone tell me that it’s a good that if we make any outbound link on our post..or it give negative effect to our website…
any reply will be appreciated..
I would recomment always using at least 1 image in each post, use your keyword in the image title and alt tag. using your keyword in the first and last sentences also helps.