Research, Then Write.
Do a research, then write content. You can perform a Google search or you can use Google trends. Perform a Google search about content you are about to write and find out the best post. Now, you have to write several times better post than that best post in order to rank on first page of Google. As you might have heard “The best place to hide a dead body is second page of Google’s search results”.
Google Trends and Keyword Planner are both free services to get idea about keywords, but Google trends is short and simple whereas for keyword planner, you need to sign up for AdWords (That requires credit card now just for confirmation). You can also find trending content for your keyword on Buzzsumo.Perform Keyword Research for Optimising your content.
Try to include keywords in your content, Title, Tags as well as description. Start typing your keyword in Google search and you will be able to see keyword ideas in Suggestions. Further, you can get keyword ideas from related search queries appear at the end of search results.
Get keyword Idea from keyword planner or Google trends. Try to use keywords with higher search Volumes and at the same time relevant to your post. Add keywords and location if it’s targeted to some specific country or city or state else keep it all locations for finding global search volume.
As soon as you hit “Get Ideas” You will be able to see a graph, keyword ideas and a download button. Click on download button and download the excel file. After that, you can simply sort it according to search volume in descending order and apply filter of your focus keyword.
You can also apply multiple filters if you have two focus keywords. Filter out keywords with higher search volume and relevance to your post and then add it to your content. Make sure you don’t forcefully stuff it.Use Keywords in Title, Meta Description & Tags.
Title of your post should not exceed 50-60 characters and for optimum results try to place keyword at the beginning of the title. Don’t forget to write meta description for your Blog Post. Meta description should not exceed 156 characters because after that text will be truncated from SERP.
Your meta description should contain both keywords as well as words that grab user’s attention because your blog posts meta description will be visible after title in Google’s SERP. You can keep testing with meta description like recently Jabong used”✓”Tick symbol in their meta description and experienced huge spike in traffic within a month.
Meta Keywords are abandoned by Search Engines because of low content sites were ranking well on search just by using meta keywords so, if you are using still using meta keywords you are doing old school SEO. You can use tags instead to give a hint to Search Engine that what your content is all about.Use Terms with High Click through Rate in titles.
Try to write posts with title “How to” or List posts like “5 signs” When you perform a search on Google, Which one result you will be clicking to. Most probably “50+ Reasons or ways“. List posts are eye grabbers and catches the attention of user immediately. Further, There is one more reason for creating list-post.
If you list 10 points in your blog post and if reader is not interested in any part of list post, then reader can simply skip that point and proceed to next point. Similarly, if reader likes few points of list post, then reader can share the list post just because of those few points.
Terms like “How to “
“Guide”
“Tutorial”
“Free”
“Blog post”
“Great”
“Things”
“Best”
“List” have high search volume and click-through rate. If you are writing process to do something, then prefer using “How to” term.Write content which provides the answer to all related questions or queries.
Try to answer questions in the post, For that you need to ask questions. Many people search for solutions by just putting their question in Google. If your blog post have answers to their questions, then you can cleverly use those questions in Blog Post. Easy way to get featured in Google Answers. Just have a look at this image to get idea.
Make sure you provide answer to the question of reader and satisfy the user intent otherwise this would lead to increase in bounce rate, leading to fall in rankings. Bounce rate is also a ranking signal in Google search.Use All Headings <H1> to <H6>.
Use multiple headings, i.e. <h2>,<h3>,<h4> & so on, but H1 tag should be used only once that too in title. Use <H1> tag only once, rest you can diversify according to your article. Try to include all of them in the Blog Post.
Don’t forget to put in keywords in headings and they must make sense also to readers. Put your priority keywords in H1 then less prior in H2 then H3 and so on.Enhance user readability and create structured data.
Make sure that you don’t write more than 6-7 sentence and 70-100 words in a paragraph. This will enhance readability index. Use bullets and numbers as much as you can, Google loves structured data.Assign Proper Name to Images .
Make sure you assign a proper name to images like my-first-image, Use Hyphen and don’t use underscore or space. If you use space, Link to image gets broken while sharing it over e-mail or any other medium, e.g.: If Blog Post is regarding content marketing checklist, then images can have alt tag such as :
content-marketing-checklist-1.png
content-marketing-checklist-2.png or
Content-marketing-checklist-titles.png
Content-marketing-checklist-keywords.png Depending upon type of image itself.Use Interactive Images and Reduce image size.
Use interactive images as images can bring whole lot of traffic from Pinterest as well as Google image search. Try to reduce image size using any image compression tool e.g, Imageoptim and prefer to upload in PNG format.
Heavy images increases the page load time and visitor on page can’t wait that much. PNG is loseless while JPEG is lossy (It’s like comparing apple with orange). In WordPress, there is also a plugin for the same WP Smush.Alt Tag for Images and Title Attribute for Links.
Put alt tags to images and title attribute in anchor tags. You can include keywords in both of them. If your post is in some procedure or tutorial to achieve some goal then you can simply keep Post name as image alt tag followed by number.
In WordPress, There is plugin for generating image’s alt tags & name i.e. SEO Friendly Images.Write less, Revise More.
After writing a content, Proofread it using Spellcheckplus for any grammatical error. In WordPress you can further find grammatical errors using Proofreading by Jetpack.
Create Both External and Internal Links.
Make sure to add at least 5 internal links in the Blog Post. Put external link often, to similar website of your niche or you can put external link as source of data. Don’t hesitate in mentioning data source, it increases trust factor.Spend Equal Time on Sharing as much as you do on Writing.
After publishing your post, Social bookmark it on Delicious and most importantly on Google plus page. Content sharing is equally important as content creation. Social bookmarking helps in reaching targeted audience, you can find a previously published article on “How to social bookmark all posts quickly via sitemap” consisting few popular social bookmarking sites.
More related great content, You wouldn’t hate to read :
How to Rank For Any Keyword (This is The Exact 1-2 Punch I Used to Rank #4 for “Backlinks”) (Regarding List Post)
How to Create 10x Content – Whiteboard Friday (Regarding 10x content)
11 Tools to Help Launch Your First Content Marketing Campaign (Regarding Buzzsumo & other tools)
If you face any problem or if you have any query, drop a line in comments. We are just a click away. Don’t forget to share this article if it provided you any useful information.
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Aakash Goyal
+Aakash+is a tech enthusiast who also keep on discovering latest seo and geeky tips.
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