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SEO Guide For Optimized Blog Posts

Since there are millions of blog posts published each day, you need to make sure that you are doing all you can to stand out from the crowd. While social media today can help you get the message out that your content is quality content, SEO can multiply the impact and help further improve the performance of your best blog posts search engines. The following SEO guide will help you make the most out of your blog posts.

How You Write Is More Important Than What You Write

1. Keyword Research Should Be Done Before Writing

Read: 5 Ways SEO Can Benefit Fashion Writers

No SEO guide for bloggers would be complete without talking about keyword research. There are certain phrases that people are looking for, and if you don’t optimize your blog posts to reflect those phrases, you are not going to show up for them in the search engines.

Go ahead and search for phrase ‘he won’t take me out’. What do you see in the results? They either contain the phrase ‘he won’t take me out’, or related terms inside the post or description. If you don’t optimize for that phrase, then you won’t show up in the search engines – it is that simple.

Read: How You Write Is More Important Than What You Write

One trick I use when searching for keywords is Google’s suggestions. For instance, if you type ‘he won’t take me out’ into the search engine, you get suggestions such as ‘he won’t take me out on a date’ or ‘he won’t take me out in public’. This is an indicator that people are searching for those specific keywords, and you should include that information in your keyword research.

2. LSI Keywords Are Important

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. Simply put, LSI keywords are words that are similar to your main keyword. For instance, ‘blogging’ may be the main keyword in your blog post, but keywords such as ‘writing posts’ or ‘blog’ or blogger’ are all related to blogging.

Once you have a list of similar words, try to incorporate those words into your post. For example, “Many people say that blogging can be a lucrative career. It wouldn’t seem that writing posts on a blog about things that you love could earn you a full-time income, but as an experienced blogger I know that the earning potential is limitless!”

3. Relevance Is The Key

The biggest search engine, Google, wants to provide relevant information to its users, and that means that it is not only going to take into account main keywords and LSI keywords, but relevant content as well.
The definition of relevant is ‘closely connected or appropriate to the matter at hand’. Google has even said that they will elevate a page in the search engine, even if that page doesn’t have a ton of links or PageRank, if signals show the page to be MORE relevant.

This means that you need to stick to the keyword you are writing about and write a relevant blog post around that keyword. In other words, do not try to optimize your article for the keyword ‘blogging with integrity’ but then spend most of the article talking about how you have achieved success with your blog. Instead, keep the topic tightly on blogging with integrity.

4. Internal Linking

You can help to support the relevancy of your blog posts through internal linking. This helps the search engines see that you have related content on your blog that could benefit the reader. And that can help increase the value of your blog post in the search engines eyes. It is safe to say that if you are not doing internal linking, then you are not fully optimizing your page for search engines.When deciding what internal page link, remember that the main thing search engines are looking for is value and relevance. This means that they want relevant links leading to comprehensive and valuable posts.

Therefore, when adding examples of external links you should consider whether they are going to be helpful to readers or not. If you think that the linked post is not related and will not be helpful to the reader to understand the current blog post further, then don’t add it!

How many internal links should you add? Just as with keywords, you don’t want to overdo it. The total number of links from a page should not surpass 75 (that includes navigation links); however, I would recommend having even less. The fewer links you have, the more your relevant internal linking strategy can stand out.

The above SEO guide is something you can use on every post to help boost your presence and authority in the search engines. While this is not an exhaustive list to SEO optimization, it will help you create blog posts that have an excellent chance of ranking high in the search engines.

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