How To Write Blogs For SEO

“How do I write for SEO?” is such a popular question.

Everyone wonders what the best practices are for writing for SEO, especially since everyone has a blog these days it’s a wonder how to get to the top of the search page.

Writing for SEO doesn’t have to be hard. In fact, it’s a lot easier and more digestible than a lot of people think.

Here are 8 simple tips on how to write for SEO.

1. Repeat the title/keyword you want to rank for SEO in the beginning of your blog.

You might not have noticed, or maybe you did, but I wrote some variation of “how to write blogs for SEO” repeatedly up above. The more you write the repeat of the title throughout the blog the better your blog post will rank for SEO. It’s telling Google that whatever the topic you’re writing about is very heavy on the information in the title. Your title should also be the keyword(s) you want to rank for. When I’m writing about blogs + SEO + write over and over again it’s showing how I want to rank for these three keywords.

2. Include your keyword(s) in the title, the first 300 words and in the first H1 or H2 code.

In the title of this blog post I wrote “How to Write Blogs for SEO” then rewrote a variation of that title in the first 300 words of the opening sentences of this blog. The next step is to use the keyword(s) in your first H1 or H2 in your blog. An important thing to note is this has to be H1 or H2 — not H3 and not bold. Bolding your words doesn’t do anything in terms of search engines.

3. When you’re choosing topics you want to rank for make sure it feels natural

It shouldn’t be difficult for you to write about a certain topic if you want to be known as an expert for it. For me, I’ve done in-person SEO training and research on my own to make sure I’m staying on top of this information as best as possible and not talking out of my ass. I’ve also written nearly one thousand blog posts and have articles that reached over 5 million page views.

4. Put yourself in the place of your targeted audience

Think about how you use Google to search for topics. I’m going to assume you are often Googling straightforward questions or for a particular phrase because you want to know an answer or buy something specific. Keeping this in mind for SEO, be sure you’re writing exactly what people are going to get in your title and alt text. For this blog post, my title is straightforward. I’m telling you I will teach you how to write blogs for SEO and that is exactly what I’m doing. You are getting what you clicked on. That’s what you want when you’re searching for something and that’s exactly what your target audience wants as well.

5. Write enough content for it to matter for SEO

Sure, writing a couple of hundred words is putting content out there but you should always be aiming for a minimum of 500 words to really make it count. There is a lot of research that shows that search engines give articles that are 2,000 words more favor because of their in-depth content. This is because the more words you have in your blog post the more value and information you’re going to give your readers. It will also trigger the keyword(s) more because you’re writing about the topic more.

6. Use the alt text option for photos

Basically, write your keyword(s) in as many places as possible.. If you’re a food blogger writing about how to make artichokes then you will want to caption your photo the same way with only focusing on keywords. If you use Squarespace as your website platform, there’s now a tab on the blog page that says SEO and allows you to add in an SEO title and SEO description.

7. Take out “filler” words in URLs for improved SEO

URLs can be long and filled with extra characters and “filler words.” Filler words are things like: a, the, three, if, when, etc. So if I’m writing a blog titled How To Perfectly Cook An Artichoke Instead of the URL looking like the default of “how-to-perfectly-cook-an-artichoke” I would edit it to “cook-artichoke” so that Google knows exactly what this is about — cooking artichokes.

If you’re on Squarespace there’s a super simple way to edit the URL by clicking on the “options” tab on the blog post page.

8. Ask questions in your blog posts as H1 or H2 headlines

Asking questions in your blog post (that you give the answer to) has shown to be very good for SEO lately. Back to the artichoke example, if I was writing the blog post on how to cook an artichoke I might ask some questions in the blog like:

• What is an artichoke?

• How do I cook an artichoke?

• Where do artichokes grow?

• How do I know when my artichoke is done?

• How do I eat my artichoke?

And then give the answer. to those questions below. This type of Q+A style writing works well because people are Googling those exact questions.

I hope these simple steps helped you gain more clarity on how to write your blog posts for SEO. If you have any additional questions, feel free to leave a comment below!