Tuesday 3 June 2014

How To Write a Blog Post for SEO

How To Write a Blog Post for SEO

When writing content bear in mind the age old adage of composing a short story - the beginning, the middle and the end. 

Often a blog post poses a question identifying a need, describing a hypothetical situation and concluding with a summary solving a problem or scenario.

The theory behind writing an online article with SEO in mind

This blog post is written to illustrate the components of a web page as outlined below. 

First of all decide on the theme for your post and think of suitable phrases and keywords in advance, sculpting the page to reflect the theme of your content in an engaging fashion. This article is written on the theme of "How to write for SEO" with the keywords 'content' 'headers' 'engaging' 'sharing' and 'SEO'.

The main objective of online publishing is to provide an informative guide, provide free information whilst ultimately looking to promote a product or service written in a manner which would encourage readers to share your article, blog post or web page by email or social media.   
  • Content is King - Headlines are there to grab attention. Use a title which makes people stop and decide to click in to read further. Popular phrases include "Discover The Best Way..." / "How To ..." / "Ten Top Tips When ..."
  • Use specific keywords and phrases to help Search Engines figure out the relevance of your page versus other pages published on the internet
  • The first paragraph should further underline the importance of the headline, using 2 or 3 sentences at minimum (you can write more if you wish) remembering your keywords
  • Use the first subheader H2 as a continuation on topic, with more text following 
  • Always write for people with SEO in mind as a secondary priority. If your blog post is not compelling reading, you have wasted your time, visitors are unlikely to share socially or recall information if the script is repetitive and poorly written.
3 Things To Remember
  1. The page title - and the URL (often re written automatically by CMS platforms) E.g. When I am creating a new page in Wordpress my settings allow the platform to create the URL as I type the title www.1weekseo.co.uk/small-business-seo/seo-training-somerset. This is referred to as an SEO-friendly URL as opposed to www.1weekseo.co.uk/small-business-seo/seo-training-somerset/cat.asp?sid=1&ID=2
  2. A headline and sub headers - H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and lastly H6
  3. Keyword rich text - Content is King, write for readers, not Google, avoid repeating keywords
  4. Keywords in the CMS - Wordpress has many plugins with Yoast being a global favourite. Avoid stuffing your keywords into repetitive phrases like ‘music mastering’ ‘cd mastering’ ‘studio mastering’ ‘online mastering’ simply choose ‘mastering’ ‘music’ ‘cd’ ‘online’.

SEO Headings Elements - as utilised by 1weekSEO

Only one H1 Header should be used in most circumstances - You can use any number of H2, H3, H4, H5, H6 Elements on your blog post or web page, most common is just the first 2 or 3 as using 4,5 and 6 may appear too bulky on a regular page.

Think of a newspaper front page - the headline should grab attention and make it absolutely clear what you are writing about: 

In this case “Games, Set and Match” as the H1
Followed by “Wimbo Gold for Murray” as the corresponding H2 subheader
Additionally, a change of subject would be “Bolt romps to 100m win” as a second H2 or a H3

Headers are theoretically the most important structure of a blog post or web page at this time. Major search engines - Google Bing, Yahoo - crawl web pages and look for these. Headers are labelled in order of importance, let me describe my coffee this morning:



On my website is an internal page explaining about the Importance of Social Media, can you see how the structure is laid out using the elements described above?