One of the types of content that is extremely effective in helping with website SEO in the pursuit of better search engine rankings is blog posts. You can create a blog post on any subject, it can be as long or as short as you wish, and if optimised correctly, it can help boost rankings on search engines.

Although writing a blog post is not difficult, if it is to be used as part of an SEO campaign, it requires more than just tapping the words on a keyboard. There are several ways to ensure that the published blog post is not only an excellent piece of content worth reading but also SEO friendly and thus contributes positively to helping the website it is published on rank higher on search engines.

Here are ten of those ways.

Plan Every Blog Post Properly: This relates to not just thinking about what you are going to write about, important though that is. It is also about planning the SEO aspects of your blog post, such as what keywords you are going to use, where you are going to include them, and also if there is going to be a call to action within your blog post to encourage readers to take action once they have read it.

Create A Structure For Each Blog Post: Just as your entire website should have a site structure, your blog posts should also have a structure that is both reader-friendly and SEO-friendly. Specifics related to the structure include the blog post’s introduction, the main body of the blog post, sub-sections, and the conclusion or call to action if there is one.

Use Paragraphs And Headings Effectively: The key here is ‘effectively’ as it is true that most people include paragraphs and headings in their blog posts. To make paragraphs effective, consider their length while trying not to make them too long, and ensure each paragraph has an identifiable subject or idea. For headings, make sure they adhere to your blog post’s structure, are relatively short, and most importantly, include keywords in them.

Use Transitional Words: As you write, do as much as you can to add structure to your blog post and help readers scan through and still understand how each sentence or paragraph relates to the next one. This is achieved using transitional words, some of which are ‘for example’, ‘however’, ‘as such’, and ‘similarly’, to name but four.

Use A Range Of Related Keywords: Undoubtedly, there are keywords that you wish to prioritise when creating content. However, there is a risk that you overuse them, which will not go down well with search engines. The solution to this is to use related keywords throughout your blog posts as these will almost certainly be search terms that you can rank for. For example, if your main keyword is oral health, substitute it with dental health and oral well-being.

Make Each Post Appropriate Length: There is much debate about the optimum length of blog posts. One fact that is not disputed is that a blog post must be at least 300 words long for SEO purposes. Long blog posts over 1,000 words are okay; however, the caveat, if you start veering towards 3,000 words, is to make sure your blog post is not so long as to put people off reading it or possibly risk losing their interest as they read it.

Create A Descriptive URL For Your Blog Post: It is bizarre that some website owners still create URLs for blog posts that are no more than the date it was created, or worse, just a number for each blog post. These do nothing for SEO. Instead, create a descriptive URL that lets anyone seeing it know exactly what the blog post is about, and better still, do so using one or more of your keywords.

Seek Authoritative Backlinks To Your Blog Post: To boost your blog post’s ranking well, you must seek backlinks from other websites. By all means, get several, but rather than focus on how many backlinks you attain, aim to get backlinks from websites that carry some authority, as these will provide a greater boost in rankings than backlinks from websites with little or no authority.

Include Links Out To Other Content: In addition to linking into your blog post, it is best SEO practice to link out from them too. You should link to external websites, as this looks natural to search engines, but more importantly, for SEO, you should link to other pages, including other blog posts within your website. This helps create relevance as well as help ranking power flow through your website.

Ask Others To Read And Evaluate Your Content Before Publishing: Our final advice is to get at least one other person to read through your blog post before you publish it on your website. Another set of eyes can spot errors that you might have missed or highlight paragraphs that are not quite as clear as they could be.