How to write seo articles: anatomy of a perfect blog post
Posted: Tue Dec 10, 2024 10:29 am
Beyond the impressive numbers. The challenge for many in digital marketing is to place our content in the corresponding ranking according to the search made by our potential client. And that involves writing SEO articles , that is, articles that are search engine friendly and add value to the potential client. In this article, I want to share the steps so that you know how to write ideal SEO articles.
Anatomy of a perfect post: how to write SEO articles
1. Define “People”
Creating content for the sake of creating it is a waste of time — and money. Today, virtually anyone can write a blog and put a post out there in the hope of ranking on Google. But the real key is that that content means something to someone.
So before you write, define a “ Buyer Persona ” in which you can understand their characteristics as an audience. And especially where it is clear what their concerns are, what they need to solve and what solutions they are looking for. The purpose of your content should be to answer those concerns of your ideal client in such a way that it is useful for the search they are carrying out. Remember that a good “ Buyer Persona ” must be built on the basis of real data.
Google Keyword Planner
2. Research search terms
With the Buyer Persona in mind, the next step is to research the words, terms, and phrases that your potential customers are using in their search boxes. There are a couple of ways to research and identify those target phrases.
The quick and crude way if you will. This would be to use Google Trends, Answer The Public or Google Autosuggest to get a feel for the phrases your persona is using. However, if you want to challenge yourself a bit more, you can uncover volumes of real data and see the competition for those individual phrases using tools like SEMrush, Google Adwords or the Google Keyword Planner.
The important thing to keep in mind is that higher search volume isn’t always better. Targeting specific “long-tail” phrases may not be searched for as often. And it will be much less competitive (therefore more likely to rank). In fact, searches with “long-tail” phrases tend to be searches for very specific information. So they’re the perfect seed for a blog post.
Best practice: Get that important search term into the body of your blog post quickly. The more prominent the term is in the article, the clearer the focus of the page will be for search engines.
3. The tone and voice of the content
You’ve done your research. Now it’s time to put pen to paper – or fingers to keyboard? Hopefully, you’ve found your key search terms by now. So you should be happy with the words you’re going to write. But what language are you going to use? By language, I don’t mean English or German. What I mean is the personality of your writing. It doesn’t matter if your blog is #1 in SERPs (Search Engine Results Page), if the tone of your writing isn’t in line with your audience, it won’t be particularly appealing to them.
To be more specific, this is what I mean:
Tone: Your personality described with an adjective. For example: “Brands can be upbeat, positive, cynical, or professional.”
Voice: A subset of your voice. Tone adds a specific flavor to your voice based on factors such as audience, situation, and channel. Voice can be flippant, boring, relatable, business-like, etc.
4. Optimize everything
Well, not everything. Excessive use and repetition of the same terms will be seen as spam. This can mean that search engines will penalize you. And consequently you will not rank in the results. The places within your article where search engines will give relevance to keywords are:
The URL
The Title of the page
The titles «H1», «H2»…
The ALT tag in images
Duplicate content (ouch!)
Make sure your target phrase appears once in each of those locations. While it’s not technically a ranking factor, you should also optimize your meta descriptions. Ideally, they should include your “long-tail search phrase” to help improve click-through rate and tell readers that your blog has what they’re looking for.
AMP Pages
5. Mobile friendly site
Nowadays your blog will be read on a mobile or tablet. Nothing new. Therefore, it is very important that your blog reads well on narrow screens. To make your blog mobile-friendly, make sure to take note of the following:
Keep font sizes legible: No one wants to squint at their screen.
Uniform link size: Clickable gambling data turkey elements should be finger-friendly.
Format your content with headings, bullet points, or images. This will bring your content to life.
Consider the number of words: although long content indexes very well, on mobile devices very long scrolls can be counterproductive. Balance is the word here.
If you want to go the extra mile, seriously consider using a version of Google's AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) pages on your blog. This will eliminate a lot of hassle and ensure your blog looks amazing on mobile phones.
6. Links
Backlinks pointing to your blog will boost your content’s visibility in search. But you probably already knew that, right? If you can legitimately acquire or syndicate some quality links to your blog, you’ll be in a better position than most of your competitors. Those links from other sites give some importance and relevance to your content. It’s not just about the inbound link, though. A well-optimized blog post also needs to internally link to resources, pages, and blogs on your own site to help drive visitors to consume more of your content. As well as improve the ranking of those pages.
Good practice: Quality is better than quantity when it comes to inbound links, stay away from cheap purchased links from shady looking link farms.
ALT Tag or ALT Tag
7. Images
Any decent blog post should make proper use of interesting and relevant images. Not just one featured image, but several consistent, filtered images that are coherent with the text. Stay away from the classic stock photo. These won’t impress your readers and will probably give off a totally undesirable “junk content” image.
Once you have your images, you need to optimize them (not just the Alt tag). Crop or resize your images to a consistent aspect ratio, and most importantly, reduce the file size. As much as you can handle without harming the quality of the images. Page load time will suffer drastically if you use a handful of 5MB HD photos on your blog. For image processing you can use Adobe Photoshop, Canva, or PicMonkey. Look carefully at the quality options when saving your images.
Best practice: If you are using other people's images under a Creative Commons license, be sure to credit the original owner at the bottom of each image on your blog.
Anatomy of a perfect post: how to write SEO articles
1. Define “People”
Creating content for the sake of creating it is a waste of time — and money. Today, virtually anyone can write a blog and put a post out there in the hope of ranking on Google. But the real key is that that content means something to someone.
So before you write, define a “ Buyer Persona ” in which you can understand their characteristics as an audience. And especially where it is clear what their concerns are, what they need to solve and what solutions they are looking for. The purpose of your content should be to answer those concerns of your ideal client in such a way that it is useful for the search they are carrying out. Remember that a good “ Buyer Persona ” must be built on the basis of real data.
Google Keyword Planner
2. Research search terms
With the Buyer Persona in mind, the next step is to research the words, terms, and phrases that your potential customers are using in their search boxes. There are a couple of ways to research and identify those target phrases.
The quick and crude way if you will. This would be to use Google Trends, Answer The Public or Google Autosuggest to get a feel for the phrases your persona is using. However, if you want to challenge yourself a bit more, you can uncover volumes of real data and see the competition for those individual phrases using tools like SEMrush, Google Adwords or the Google Keyword Planner.
The important thing to keep in mind is that higher search volume isn’t always better. Targeting specific “long-tail” phrases may not be searched for as often. And it will be much less competitive (therefore more likely to rank). In fact, searches with “long-tail” phrases tend to be searches for very specific information. So they’re the perfect seed for a blog post.
Best practice: Get that important search term into the body of your blog post quickly. The more prominent the term is in the article, the clearer the focus of the page will be for search engines.
3. The tone and voice of the content
You’ve done your research. Now it’s time to put pen to paper – or fingers to keyboard? Hopefully, you’ve found your key search terms by now. So you should be happy with the words you’re going to write. But what language are you going to use? By language, I don’t mean English or German. What I mean is the personality of your writing. It doesn’t matter if your blog is #1 in SERPs (Search Engine Results Page), if the tone of your writing isn’t in line with your audience, it won’t be particularly appealing to them.
To be more specific, this is what I mean:
Tone: Your personality described with an adjective. For example: “Brands can be upbeat, positive, cynical, or professional.”
Voice: A subset of your voice. Tone adds a specific flavor to your voice based on factors such as audience, situation, and channel. Voice can be flippant, boring, relatable, business-like, etc.
4. Optimize everything
Well, not everything. Excessive use and repetition of the same terms will be seen as spam. This can mean that search engines will penalize you. And consequently you will not rank in the results. The places within your article where search engines will give relevance to keywords are:
The URL
The Title of the page
The titles «H1», «H2»…
The ALT tag in images
Duplicate content (ouch!)
Make sure your target phrase appears once in each of those locations. While it’s not technically a ranking factor, you should also optimize your meta descriptions. Ideally, they should include your “long-tail search phrase” to help improve click-through rate and tell readers that your blog has what they’re looking for.
AMP Pages
5. Mobile friendly site
Nowadays your blog will be read on a mobile or tablet. Nothing new. Therefore, it is very important that your blog reads well on narrow screens. To make your blog mobile-friendly, make sure to take note of the following:
Keep font sizes legible: No one wants to squint at their screen.
Uniform link size: Clickable gambling data turkey elements should be finger-friendly.
Format your content with headings, bullet points, or images. This will bring your content to life.
Consider the number of words: although long content indexes very well, on mobile devices very long scrolls can be counterproductive. Balance is the word here.
If you want to go the extra mile, seriously consider using a version of Google's AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) pages on your blog. This will eliminate a lot of hassle and ensure your blog looks amazing on mobile phones.
6. Links
Backlinks pointing to your blog will boost your content’s visibility in search. But you probably already knew that, right? If you can legitimately acquire or syndicate some quality links to your blog, you’ll be in a better position than most of your competitors. Those links from other sites give some importance and relevance to your content. It’s not just about the inbound link, though. A well-optimized blog post also needs to internally link to resources, pages, and blogs on your own site to help drive visitors to consume more of your content. As well as improve the ranking of those pages.
Good practice: Quality is better than quantity when it comes to inbound links, stay away from cheap purchased links from shady looking link farms.
ALT Tag or ALT Tag
7. Images
Any decent blog post should make proper use of interesting and relevant images. Not just one featured image, but several consistent, filtered images that are coherent with the text. Stay away from the classic stock photo. These won’t impress your readers and will probably give off a totally undesirable “junk content” image.
Once you have your images, you need to optimize them (not just the Alt tag). Crop or resize your images to a consistent aspect ratio, and most importantly, reduce the file size. As much as you can handle without harming the quality of the images. Page load time will suffer drastically if you use a handful of 5MB HD photos on your blog. For image processing you can use Adobe Photoshop, Canva, or PicMonkey. Look carefully at the quality options when saving your images.
Best practice: If you are using other people's images under a Creative Commons license, be sure to credit the original owner at the bottom of each image on your blog.