Boosting your SEO – How to Get Help

When you built your website, you likely created it with your users in mind, trying to make it easy for them to find and explore your content. One of those users is a search engine, which helps people discover your content. SEO—short for search engine optimization—is about helping search engines understand your content, and helping users find your site and make a decision about whether they should visit your site through a search engine.

The Search Essentials outline the most important elements of what makes your website eligible to appear on Google Search. While there’s no guarantee that any particular site will be added to Google’s index, sites that follow the Search Essentials are more likely to show up in Google’s search results. SEO is about taking the next step and working on improving your site’s presence in Search. This guide will walk you through some of the most common and effective improvements you can do on your site.

There are no secrets here that’ll automatically rank your site first in Google (sorry!). In fact, some of the suggestions might not even apply to your business, but following the best practices will hopefully make it easier for search engines (not just Google) to crawl, index, and understand your content.

Creating a blog post takes a lot of time and effort. It also costs a lot in terms of resources, whether you create them in-house or outsource. Because of this, you need each blog post to give you a good return on investment (ROI).

For instance, Google receives 3.5 billion searches every single day, and the first 5 results for a given search account for 67% of all clicks. This shows how important it is to optimize your blog posts to increase rankings and maximize traffic.

In this post, we’ll share our blog post SEO checklist to help you optimize your blog posts for SEO like a pro. Doing so will help you consistently get more traffic to your site.

Table of Contents

What Is Blog SEO?

Blog SEO is the practice of optimizing a blog’s content, site architecture and HTML code for search engines. Common tasks associated with blog SEO include on-page optimization, installing plugins, improving page loading speed and internal linking.

Search engine optimization is what you do to grow your visibility on search engine results pages. The higher your website ranks, the better—it means more people will see your page when they search a relevant query, click through to your website, read your content, and get to know your brand. It’s not an exact science, and the best practices change frequently, but optimizing your website content and structure could ultimately drive more conversions than any of your other digital marketing efforts.

SEO is a process of creating content that ranks on search engines. Using SEO techniques shows Google your content is valuable and worth showing to your target audience.

Will your content land on the first page of Google and get tons of traffic? Or will it get lost on page 6 of Google? SEO will determine this.

Keep reading for the best SEO hacks I’ve discovered after years of writing website content. It’s important to note that SEO changes over time in terms of what Google looks for. However, the following tips and tricks are the important basics that stay the same.

Why Is Blog SEO Important?

Search engines are a super important traffic source for blogs.

In fact, a recent survey of over 1000 bloggers found that SEO was their 3rd most important source of traffic (just behind email marketing).

Whether you’re blogging as a primary source of income or you want to add a blog to your business website, blog SEO can help you reach more people, raise brand awareness, and meet sales goals.

If your blog is optimized well for SEO, Google will make it visible. When people search for keywords in Google, the goal is that they’ll see your content right away. Then, they’ll head to your site and check you out before your competitors can get to them!

Our own blog is living proof of the power of SEO. Sure, we get a fair amount of traffic from Twitter, LinkedIn, email and direct traffic. And added together, these sources make up the majority of our monthly traffic.

But Google sends us over 396,000 visitors per month.

Without blog SEO, our site’s growth would have been much slower.

And if you want to learn how to optimize your blog for SEO, check out these tested SEO tips.

In a noisy world, SEO is one of the best ways for businesses to be seen by their target audiences. Remember, when people use search engines, they’re doing a targeted search. They’re actively looking for what you’re offering, so making sure your site is the first one users see should be a crucial part of your digital marketing strategy.

A high ranking in search engine results can lead to increased traffic, brand awareness, and sales for a business. Good SEO performance can also help to establish a business as an authority in its industry, as well as improve the user experience of a website.

With improved content, better navigation structure, optimized images and faster loading times, customers are more likely to stay longer on your page, which increases the chances of them buying or availing your services. Additionally, with higher rankings on SERPs comes direct referral traffic from Google or other search engines that further helps boost sales conversions.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is of paramount importance in creating a successful website. It helps search engines understand the content on each page, which can significantly increase visibility and the likelihood of ranking higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). On-page SEO involves optimizing elements like title tags, alt text, headlines, URLs, meta descriptions, and internal links. Making sure these elements are optimized properly will make sure your website gets seen by more people and increases your chances of appearing in the top positions on SERPs. Overlooking things such as broken links can have the opposite effect.

In addition to SEO-specific factors, it is also important to focus on making quality content that is well-structured and easy to read for both humans and machines. Content should be tailored to the target audience’s interests and needs. Quality content should have keyword research done before writing so that topics are relevant to the target keywords; this helps ensure that search engines recognize the relevance of a given page and rank it accordingly.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is just as important as on-page SEO when it comes to optimizing a website for search engine results. It includes activities such as link building and social media presence, which can help increase the visibility and authority of a website. Building quality backlinks from other websites with high domain authority can be incredibly beneficial for increasing visibility in SERPs, as well as building credibility with potential customers. Link building helps to spread the word about your website and establish trustworthiness, since Google rewards websites that are seen by more people, have more links pointing to them, and are seen by other authoritative sources.

Additionally, having a presence on social media platforms can also help to grow visibility. By engaging with users online through comments and posts, you can create a loyal customer base that will share your content on their own social channels. This will lead to more traffic being driven to your site, which in turn increases the chances of ranking higher in SERPs. Social media marketing is also an effective way to advertise products and services by targeting specific audiences based on user interests or demographics. Not only does this drive traffic but it helps build relationships with customers and allows businesses to get real-time feedback from their target audiences.

Local SEO for Small Businesses

Local SEO is a specific type of SEO that focuses on optimizing a website for local search results. This is particularly important for small businesses that rely on local customers. Optimizing for local SEO involves claiming local business listings, building citations, and getting listed in online directories.

This type of SEO is an important factor because it allows businesses to connect with potential customers who have already expressed an interest in the services or products that they offer. Optimizing a website for local search not only gives small businesses increased visibility, but also improves qualified leads, as customers will find them more easily when searching for specific keywords related to what they need. Furthermore, local SEO can help build brand awareness and credibility among those within the target market of the business by providing them with relevant information about what they offer and why they should choose them over any other competitors.

The benefits of refreshing your old blog posts

Boost your SEO rankings – That new section or some additional keywords could be all you needed to go from Google’s 2nd page to the 1st, or from the 3rd spot to the coveted top result
Get more (and more relevant) traffic – Makes sense when you rank higher and for the right keywords, doesn’t it?
Link to more recent articles and boost their SEO too! – We bet you have so many recent blog posts that expand on topics mentioned in older ones. But because you hadn’t written them yet, they’re not linked
Provide better user experience – Did you link to websites that no longer exist? Or mention a service you don’t offer anymore? These might seem like small problems but can undermine your credibility and annoy your readers
Stand out even more – Now that some time has passed, you probably have new original content that you can add to your older blog posts (like videos, case studies and data)
Harness strong calls-to-action – Imagine having a blog post that keeps bringing you traffic… but without telling your readers what to do next! Maybe, when you wrote those old articles, you didn’t have a newsletter (and now you do – so, you can encourage your readers to subscribe). Or perhaps you can direct them to a new service
Generate more leads and sales – That’s what all the previous points boil down to (hurray!)

Video and SEO

The basis of SEO is aligning your internal content strategy with what the search engine’s algorithm is prioritizing. And while we don’t always have transparency from Google to know exactly what they’re looking for, we do know that video is a powerful tool for SEO.

So, why does video help SEO rankings? Here’s what we know about the connection.

First, we know that when Google shows a video thumbnail next to a search result, which it does for 26% of search results according to BrightEdge, users are more likely to click that listing. The presence of the thumbnail makes the result a “rich snippet,” and rich snippets tend to have higher click-through rates than standard snippets.

We also know that Google has been rumored to prioritize search results with video above results without video. While Google hasn’t explicitly confirmed this idea, many marketers agree that their SEO results suggest that it’s true.

Our data at Lemon light is no exception—almost all of our pages bringing in the most organic traffic include video content, and we typically see boosts in organic traffic ranging from 10% to a whopping 250% when we add video content to existing posts. We host our marketing-related videos on YouTube as well (find them all here), so we’re improving our SEO efforts while also bringing in new traffic directly from YouTube.

Which Metrics Can Video SEO Help?

Video also helps other metrics that we know Google takes into consideration for search engine rankings. Two of the most important metrics for SEO are the time users spend on your page or site and the number of backlinks referring back to your domain, and video almost always improves both of these figures. Studies show that people spend over twice as long on a page with video than without, and the higher the quality of your content, the more likely you are to get backlinks.

So, video benefits SEO both directly and indirectly—the video alone likely influences your ranking, and it influences other factors that go into Google’s selection system.

In short, Google’s algorithms are increasingly prioritizing websites with video content, and that’s not something you want to ignore; 93 percent of online experiences start with a search engine, so you want to do everything you can to appear on that crucial first page.

Use keywords appropriately.

Google is smart. If you write a blog article with your SEO keywords all over the place and some other random content thrown in there, it won’t rank.

Use keywords with intention. Here’s how:

Don’t overstuff keywords. Keyword density is essential. A good rule of thumb is to use your primary keyword phrase 1-2 times per every 100 words or 1-2%.
Incorporate keywords in headings. Use your keyword in your H1 (title), of course. Also, use it in some h2-h4 headings. Keep in mind not to overstuff and use it in every single header.
Use keywords in your meta description. A meta description is a short paragraph that summarizes your blog, shown on the SERP (search engine results page).
Include keywords in your alt text. Again, your alt text describes images. Naturally, include your keyword in some of your alt text.

Ready to get started with the blog post SEO checklist that will help you get results from your content marketing?

Then let’s get started.

1. Plan Your Content with Keyword Research

Before you start writing your blog post, you have to do keyword research. If you want to dominate the search results, you’ll have to make sure you write about topics that people are looking for. This is also a great way to find new blog post ideas.

Many bloggers just use their best guesses to write about topics they feel their users would be interested in. But you don’t need to rely on blind guesses, especially when you can do keyword research to find out exactly what your users are looking for.

Keyword research is a technique used by content creators and SEO experts. It helps you discover topics your users are interested in based on data from search engines. You can then use these keywords to plan your content strategy.

We recommend using keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, or Ahrefs to check the search volume and get examples of related keywords.

For more details, please visit WPBeginner’s post on how to do keyword research for your blog posts.

Now that you know how to find keywords to plan your content strategy, let’s move on to deciding your focus keyphrase.

Decide Your Focus Keyphrase

After you’ve done your keyword research and discovered keyword ideas, it’s time to pick a phrase that has the highest search volume, as well as low competition.

This will be your focus keyphrase. It’s the search phrase that your users are most likely to look for.

Let’s show you how to add your focus keyphrase using the best WordPress SEO plugin in the market, All in One SEO (AIOSEO). AIOSEO is one of the best WordPress SEO plugins on the market. The over 100 million downloads are a perfect testament to that. That’s why smart website owners use the plugin to help them boost their rankings and drive qualified traffic to their sites.

2. Understand Search Intent

Before you start writing, you should think carefully about the message of your blog post. What do you want to tell your readers or which central question do you want to answer?

You should also think about what search intent the reader may have. Search intent is basically the reason why someone conducts a specific search. Meeting a user’s search intent is important to consider as it will help you get readers to visit and stay on your page.

A good way to figure out the search intent is to look at the search results for the keyphrase you want to rank with and see what comes up.

As you can see, Google tries to satisfy multiple intents for the search term: SEO. Both a beginner’s guide and a definition of what SEO is.

Although, a beginner or starter guide shows up 2 times, which tells us that most users are probably looking for a guide on SEO.

Besides Google, you can also use Semrush to help you determine the search intent of your keyword.

Now, let’s move on to what you need to focus on when creating content for your blog post.

3. Optimize the Length of Your Blog Post

When optimizing the length of your blog post, you need to make sure it has a minimum of 300 words. However, keep the length of your post balanced. You don’t want it too long and you don’t want it too short.

Google likes long blog posts, but if they are too long, it can scare users away and they easily lose interest.

For blog SEO purposes, the ideal length is 2,100-2,400 words, according to HubSpot data.

However, we would recommend you only write long blog posts when you know you’re a skilled writer. Also, make sure every word adds value to your post, don’t add words just to increase the word count. Doing that will make your post less engaging and authoritative, resulting in higher bounce rates.

4. Focus on Readability

Did you know that users spend less than a second to decide whether they want to stay on a page or not?

This is why your blog post has to be interesting, engaging, and easy to read so that the readers want to stay on your site.

Readability is also an important factor for search engines. Blog posts that are easier to read often rank higher than posts that are difficult to read.

For this reason, your blog posts have to be both SEO-friendly and readable. For instance, nobody wants to read a big wall of text. That’s why you should always break up your content with shorter sentences, subheadings, images, quotes, and bullet lists—anything that will keep the reader glued to your blog post.

Here you can see that this blog post has 4 readability errors that need to be fixed, and AIOSEO makes recommendations on how to improve them.

You can also use tools like Grammarly, which allows you to check grammar, punctuation, and spelling on the fly.

For more on this topic, see WPBeginner’s post on how to improve the readability score of your blog posts.

Now, let’s move on to on-page SEO practices and one of the most important aspects of our SEO checklist, your blog post title.

5. Write a Captivating Blog Post Title

When users find your content in search results or RSS feeds, the first thing they see is your blog post or page title. Not only is that the first thing they’ll see, but it’s also extremely important for search engine rankings.

A good blog post title makes your post more relevant to the search query (the keyword combination users enter in search engines to find things they’re interested in).

More importantly, crafted well, it motivates users to actually click on your blog post when they see it in search results.

6. Add a Meta Description to Your Blog Post

A meta description is an HTML meta tag that you can add to any page. Its purpose is to provide a short description of your blog post for search engines and other crawlers. It’s also a good place to pitch your article to people as they scroll through search results pages (SERPs).

A good meta description can explain a lot about a blog post. To optimize yours, include your keyword and craft the description in such a way that it promises to meet search intent.

7. Link to Relevant Internal and External Resources

Statistics have shown that web pages that link out to high-DR (Domain Rating) resources rank higher than those that don’t. Domain Rating measures the strength of a site’s backlink profile, meaning how many pages link to that site.

It’s therefore good to link out to other sites. Just make sure you link to relevant, high-quality content.

Linking to another site should be done carefully though, as it will lead search engines to associate your site with those you’re linking to. This is why you must understand the difference between dofollow and nofollow links and when to use each.

8. Add Images and Videos to Your Blog Posts

Search engines often rank engaging content higher in search results. And images and videos are far more engaging than plain text.

You want to make sure that your blog post contains a featured image and images between paragraphs to make your content more eye-catching and interesting to read.

Optimize Your Images and Videos

Image SEO is another important element to tick off your blog post SEO checklist. This is super easy when using the block editor in WordPress in conjunction with AIOSEO.

Let’s start with showing you how to optimize your images for your blog posts. But first, don’t forget to resize your images to fit the width of your post space and compress them for site speed purposes.

To compress PNG images, you can use TinyPNG, and for JPG images, you can use Compress JPEG. Believe us when we say it will make a huge difference for how fast your blog loads, and whether users will have the patience to wait.

Once you’ve uploaded an image in your blog content, the first step is to click on the image to make sure it’s marked. It will then display a blue frame around the image.

Not less important, videos are even more engaging than images. You can convert your blog posts into videos by creating slideshows, vlogs, or experimenting with other formats.

However, you should never directly upload videos to your blog posts. WordPress is not optimized to serve videos, and your shared hosting service can’t handle them.

We recommend uploading your videos to YouTube and then embedding the video into your blog post. There are other video services you can use, but YouTube is the 2nd most popular search engine, and the second largest social media platform right after Facebook.

9. Use Categories and Tags to Organize Content

Categories and tags help you sort your content not only for yourself but for the readers and search engines.

The problem is that many WordPress users often end up using them incorrectly. If you think about your site as a book, then categories would be the table of contents and tags will be the index part of the book.

Categories are used to divide your content into major topics discussed on your blog. Tags, on the other hand, are the topics discussed in an individual blog post.

10. Write the Best Piece of Content on the Topic

Make sure to write the best piece of content on the topic. Search engines love articles that cover a topic in great detail.

You also want visitors to choose your blog post and link to it as a high-quality source. Backlinks are great for boosting rankings in search engines. And they show Google that your blog is publishing good content that other users recommend.

In fact, Google rewards sites with high-quality content and will give you more exposure.

So not only does great content make a better blog post, but it also improves your site’s rankings. This is also why we told you to gather related keywords as part of your content planning step.

These related keywords give you an idea of different variations of user searches regarding that particular topic. By covering those keywords in your article, you can make your content more comprehensive, informative, and useful.

Tips on How to Write the Best Content on a Topic

Here are some tips on how to write the best content on a topic:

Create original content, not just copy other people’s content
Write strong headlines that trigger specific emotional responses
Make your content actionable, and give visitors a sense of how to apply the information
Provide answers to questions
Write engaging content and make readers want to reflect on your content
Include videos and images to better illustrate your point and improve the overall user experience
Be accurate when stating your sources, and don’t forget to set the appropriate authorship for the post — give credit where credit’s due!
Optimize your site for speed and make sure you don’t lose your visitors before they even viewed your content

Content that’s shared more on social media ranks higher in search engines. More people will visit your site when they see something interesting you’ve shared on social media.

It also increases the likelihood that social media users will link to your content from their site or social media, which increases your rankings on Google.

To encourage social media shares you can:

Include Social Media Icons on Your Blog – this is an easy way for readers to share your content with a few simple clicks.
Encourage Users to Tweet a Link – with AIOSEO, you can add Twitter Cards that will make your Tweets stand out on Twitter and get more clicks and shares.
Use a Lead Capture Plugin – a great option is to use a WordPress lead capture plugin like OptinMonster to create attention-grabbing popup campaigns that encourage users to share your content. You can also use it to grow your email list.

Finally, let’s take a look at the importance of optimizing your older blog posts.

12. Optimize Your Older Blog Posts

Many bloggers tend to forget about a blog post after they’ve published it. In fact, you’re far from finished optimizing your blog post for SEO once it’s published.

Here are a few things that you need to do after publishing your blog post:

Review Your Older Blog Posts – go back and review your older blog posts. Did you write the best piece of content you could on the topic? You can always improve your writing and add more visual content.
Add More Internal Links – after you’ve published a post, you can go back to relevant old articles and add a link to your new blog post. This gives your new articles link juice while also allowing users to discover them more easily.
Track Search Rankings – after you’ve optimized a post for SEO, you need to keep track of your search engine rankings. This so you’ll know what to improve. For more details, check out WPBeginner’s guide on how to track search rankings for your blog posts.
Update stats and sources: Don’t forget to check if the stats and sources you used and linked to are still relevant. Go through them all and update any that are outdated or replace broken links.

Write long-form and short-form posts.

A common question in the world of blogging is how long a post should be. Google hasn’t made any official announcements, but it’s common for articles that rank to be long-form. This means they’re more than 1,000 words.

However, short-form posts are also beneficial. You can still incorporate other blog SEO hacks and have them land high in search results.

It’s also best to post content regularly. So a brief article that’s engaging, informative, and meaningful is okay. Just make sure it’s high-quality content! This is an excellent way to keep your dedicated audience in the loop.

Tip: Google your target keyword, and use wordcounter.net to see how many words are in the top 3 ranking articles. Then, use this number to guide you in your article.

Make your content reader-friendly.

Readability should be a top priority when creating blog content.

Most people are looking for content they can skim. If your content isn’t easy to read and skimmable, there’s a good chance your audience won’t stick around to read your article.

Here’s how you can create reader-friendly content:

Add visuals.
Use a dark-colored blog font that’s at least 18px.
Keep paragraphs short (1-3 sentences).
Write short, concise sentences.
Incorporate lists.

Once again, you can invest in paid and more accurate SEO tools, but if you’re a beginner, Google Keyword Planner (free) is a good place to start. The sweet spot? A long keyword that’s searched a lot, isn’t too competitive and perfectly describes your blog post (e.g. ‘how to build a WordPress website’ rather than just ‘WordPress website’).

Things to think about are…

Are there similar and additional keywords that can reinforce your main one? (like ‘how to make a WordPress website’ and ‘WordPress website tutorial’)
Weave them all into your blog post – Don’t stress over specific percentages: keyword density is a really outdated practice. Just repeat them strategically (in your first 100 words, headings, last paragraphs, title, image alt text and the body of your blog post) but only whenever you can do so naturally
Optimise your title and meta description – They must stand out against all the other ones in the SERP (search engine results page). So, showcase your unique perspective or make your readers curious
Include external links – You might be worried about people clicking away from your website, but trust us: linking to external ones will benefit both your SEO and user experience (for example, you’ll build trust by backing up your data with sources). So, include a few links to relevant websites with a high domain authority – and Google will also start treating you like one of those cool kids!
We use a (somewhat) controversial rule, and that’s to have external links open in a new window. Normally, that’s fine as there aren’t too many external links in an article so you won’t end up with loads of tabs!
Add internal links, too – Are there blog posts that expand on something you’ve mentioned? Services and products that would solve the problem you just covered? Internal links help Google understand your website better and they direct your human audience to the right next step. Bonus tip: instead of just saying ‘click here’, use keywords and descriptive words as your anchor text