When you are investing in content marketing and specifically blog content to attract organic traffic and an audience, it is important that you understand how to optimize blog posts for SEO so that you get the best return for your efforts.

After all, creating blog content can be a time-consuming and energy-draining activity even when it engages your audience and business. Since it takes so long, its correction is critical.

I’ve been in SEO for over a decade now and over that time I’ll admit I’ve gotten a little lazy about keeping up with the latest tips, tricks and tactics. Search engines are always changing and looking like a whack-a-mole so instead of focusing on some quick tips and tricks in this post (since I don’t own them), I’ll show you what SEO looks like in blog posts.

I should know, because I’ve written over 600 (maybe a little more to be honest) over the course of my SEO career. That’s an average of one a week for 10 years. Over those years, I drove millions of visitors to my sites (and my clients) resulting in millions of dollars in profits.

In this article we will cover the following:

  • Optimized ranking template builder
  • Search for the keyword
  • Structuring your content
  • Interconnection
  • External linkage
  • Links from other websites
  • Strategies for Evergreen Classifications

Building a template optimized for ranking

To start, if you want the best ranking opportunity, you need to set up SEO optimizations to succeed.

Aside from technical SEO things like sitemaps, page load speed, and all those good things, setting your site up to give you the best chance of ranking is the right way because it’s scalable.

You can focus on the creative parts of what you do instead of questioning small portions of strategy in everything you do.

This is why, when I was working with SEO clients, I always looked at their site as a series of forms rather than as individual pages.

I am attracted towards very large websites (tens of thousands to millions of pages), and the truth is that there is no way to improve every single page.

You have to think big, and the way to do that is through code.

So what does a well-optimized blog template look like?

This well-optimized blog and blog post template has the following:

  1. Optimized for the <title> tag and the meta description for the target keyword
  2. The URL contains the keywords
  3. The date of the post shows the date it was last updated
  4. Blog post title as H1
  5. Sub-nodes like H2s, H3s, etc. in structured format (if it’s a sub-point of a sub-point, it’s H3 for example)
  6. Lots of content between cover the topic of the title in detail.
  7. Pictures with ALT text, menus, videos, and any other rich media make sense.

There are some general guidelines to follow as well, such as:

  • Use your target keyword in your first paragraph
  • Get a list of what you’re talking about in the post (to try getting the featured snippet)
  • Ideally, posts should be more than 1000 words (it’s hard to cover an entire topic at the time)
  • Look at the search result for your target keyword to see what other questions people are asking about the topic, then work on those questions in your post to provide relevance.

For example, the target keyword phrase for this post is [How to improve blog posts for SEO]. When I look at the search result, I see questions like:

  • How do I improve my blog for SEO?
  • How do you improve a blog post?
  • Do blog posts help SEO?
  • How long should blog posts be for SEO?

So, I’d be smart to include those in this post (😉)

You should also use the tools at your disposal to remind you to do specific things scientifically proven to improve your rating. If you use WordPress, I highly recommend the Yoast SEO plugin. I use it on all of my sites.

Keyword Research

Then, in order to achieve your goals of attracting more audience and business via content marketing, you need to do keyword research.

Basically, you will determine the keywords your ideal audience is searching for, and then craft your own content around the topic. Keyword research is still the heart of SEO, and it can be very easy to do.

There are a few strategies to take advantage of to find keywords to target in the rankings. They are, in order of preference:

  1. Use your own data (via Search Console) to find the keywords that rank for but with suboptimal engagement targeting another phrase. Pull out these keywords, create content specifically for them, and do the presto. Better rankings. Google is already telling you that it thinks your site is relevant to that phrase, so give them what they want!
  2. Find out what your competitors are doing and you are not. To do this, I would like to use the Keyword Gap tool (click this link for a 14-day free trial) where you can put it into your site along with your competitors and see what they rank as not you. Sort by size, prioritize, and get to work.
  3. PPC data. If you are actively investing in Google Ads, you can take this data and see if there are keywords that are driving the traffic and conversions that you aren’t currently targeting with your SEO efforts. Prioritize based on search volume and conversion rates from PPC.

Effective keyword research is the foundation of good SEO. I recommend selecting the top 50 topics that you don’t currently rank for that that are relevant to your business, and then filter them out by search volume. Then find 50 more, and so on. Do this for a year, and your traffic will be amazing.

Structuring your content

Next, let’s talk about organizing your SEO content so that it can be ranked well.

I’ve already covered this a little bit in the first section with talking about H1 / H2 / H3, but it’s important enough to classify it so it’s worth the section for it.

Search engines are computer programs. It is reductive to say, but at their core they are logical computer programs and should operate the way they are written (or trained in the case of machine learning).

Hence, they like things that are predictable and can be programmed. If it cannot be programmed, it cannot be used for collation. Think of something like the “quality” of the page. This topic is always discussed in the world of SEO, but a computer program just cannot evaluate “quality”. He should break it down into its components (length, keyword use, topic relevance, etc.) and use it for ranking.

One of the most essential things you can do to better arrange is to use headings and subheadings effectively.

As I mentioned above, your blog post title should be H1. Unlike the <title> tag and your URL, this is the strongest ranking factor on a page.

Then come H2s and H3s, which are subheadings and subheadings in your subheadings. These should be the main subpoints of your topic, and ideally also have keywords related to your main topic in them.

Underneath each of these is your main content, and of course it also explains the topic and those specific subpoints perfectly with a range of media types such as menus, bold and italic, photos, videos, and more.

Internal linking

Next, let’s talk about internal engagement. Internal engagement is very important to a good ranking, and if I’m being honest that’s not something I focus on enough.

Firstly, as you write, it is important to look for opportunities to link from your new post to old posts that may benefit from more love from search engines. You will notice, if you look back through this post, I took the opportunity to link to some old blog posts on this site that are still very relevant and useful for you.

While this is all good and can help populate old posts, you can also use old posts to help arrange your new post more quickly.

A great way to do this is to post your new post, then use some Google searches to find posts on your site where you can insert links to your new post.

For example, this post you are reading is about improving blog posts. Although I would ideally find accurate anchor text like “Optimize Blog Post for SEO”, this is very unlikely.

Instead, I’ll try to find blog posts on Credo that mention the term “blog post”, which I can then link to that post once it is published.

To do that, I’ll switch to the good old Google and use this query:

Boom, all candidates:

External linkage

While the topic of “Doing Outbound Links Helping SEO” has been and will be forever discussed in SEO circles, the truth is that outbound links seem to be well-correlated with good rankings (meaning, well-ranked pages are likely to contain On external links) so linking to other trusted sources is a good practice when creating online.

After all, linking to other sources shows that you did your research while writing and that it is not only your opinion, but that you want to cite the work of others within your work.

I try to link to at least two external sources in every post, and I try to make them reliable websites that I link to as well. For your purposes, I will only consider whether the resource you link to supports and enhances your own resources.

In this case, it’s valuable to your niche and valuable to search engines. You don’t “lose link juice” by doing this, and if there is anything you can use it as a reason to access the site you are linking to and see if you can get a link from it again as well if your post adds value to them.

Inbound links from other websites

Finally, the third core SEO tenet is the links from other websites. For good ranking, your site needs backlinks from other websites.

However, I see that a lot of people are not investing in content and SEO because they are stuck at the point of “but who will link to this article?”

For the purposes of this article, I want you to think about the following:

  1. How to make your post link worthy
  2. How to think about individual post links
  3. How to build return links to your individual posts

How to make your post link worthy

Firstly, to earn backlinks, a piece of content has to be very good and easy to find as well. In fact, a lot of well-related resources are rated well precisely because they are really well arranged and found while someone writing on a similar topic does a search and thus found that piece of content. Then they decided to link to this content because it was adding value to their work.

Second, having images and quotes (aka non-text-only media) increases the likelihood that others will link to your article as they can easily pull this content from your post and use it in their posts, in addition to providing you with a link to return.

Note: A good way to improve the number of backlinks to your site is to search Google periodically for the images you own and popular quotes or stats. If you find someone using it without a link again as credit, reach out and ask for it.

Third, anything original (like data) inherently deserves a link. Hence, prioritize this type of content and make it an essential resource in your industry. We’ve done this with our Digital Marketing Price Survey, which we update every two years.

How to think about individual post links

Too many people don’t write because they don’t know how to create links back to every post. While the truth is that it helps build backlinks to every post, it’s not required for ranking.

First, find other posts on your own site / blog that you can update to link to the new post. This will help arrange your post, especially if those other posts also contain external links from other sites.

After doing that, think about how you could get links to your individual posts.

How to build links back to your individual posts

When considering how to return links to my individual posts, I ask myself the following questions:

  1. Who is adding the most value to him?
  2. What else do they read?
  3. How do I get a link to my content from the places they are already reading?

Sometimes it will be guest blogging. Sometimes people do it from their columns in major posts. 

Sometimes this is through podcast appearances (with the resources being linked next mentioned in the show notes).

It is also possible to hire an SEO company or freelance worker who will contact you to try to get other websites to link to your article from a post on this site. This type of link building can be expensive and difficult to find someone who does it well, but it can also be effective.

Strategies for Evergreen Ranking

Finally, let’s talk about some strategies you can use that can help rank your content for years and years to come.

There is a time and place for fast-paced news content, when other media can pick it up and relate widely if you are one of the first to move or spew the news. If you write actively and have an engaged audience, this might work well. It’s similar to the data content, in that if you update it, you can lead a new batch of backlinks and continue to stay on top of the ranking, as Spark Toro recently did for their “no-click” Google searches.

But there is also a time and place for persistent content, the type of “how” and other content that people search for over and over again. Usually these are broader topics, but they can also be specialized.

Let’s talk about this content, because it is often responsible for most of the consistent content driving blog traffic.

The evergreen content contains these elements:

  • Targets a topic people are constantly searching for (hopefully, in increasing numbers)
  • They are usually long with different types of media
  • Earns links over time

For example, if you are at REI and looking to increase the number of people coming to REI.com interested in the activities you sell products around, you might invest in content related to bike maintenance or promoting a tent.

And this is exactly what they did. REI invested heavily a few years ago in this type of content, which now represents (according to SEMrush) over 2 million monthly visits (!!) to their website.

There are two main things to remember about keeping your content up-to-date:

  1. You need to send signals of freshness, such as the date of the last update on your page and the update of content on the page
  2. Using the current year can be a big boost and help you target those looking for the most recent information on the topic.

For example, REI has how to pick a backpack with evergreen content. It is a solid part of the content. But it doesn’t have a last update date, it doesn’t have recently added items from the Ecommerce section, and it’s not necessarily year-old.

By adding these few mentions, I bet they’ll get more traffic.

The same goes for any type of website, even marketing, cooking or shoe repair. Every industry is constantly discovering new and better ways, so use this to your advantage.

Conclusion

  1. Now that you better understand how to optimize blog posts for SEO, it’s time to get to work!
  2. Make sure your templates are set up for SEO best practices
  3. Do a keyword research to find your next topics to create content around
  4. Build your content that search engines like
  5. Identify internal linking opportunities from your other previously published posts
  6. Make sure you’ve linked to some external resource (then reach out to let them know!)
  7. Get a few more links from other websites to get better rankings
  8. Implement some strategies for evergreen rankings so that your content increases traffic year after year.

If this is a lot and you want to hire an SEO and content marketing company to do it for you, then set up time for a discussion with our team here. We’ll help you get in touch with the right service providers!