So, you love to write? Congratulations. You are thinking of starting your own blog or start participating on other’s blog? Bravo. If you are planning to do these things, you have earned my respect. I admire people who love to do something and I have always admired the people who love to write. I always wanted to start off my own blog and that’s why I started the Chatwolfs.
But the thing is that writing is not an easy task for the beginners. You need to consider a lot of things while heading ahead with this. Like you cannot write tons of post in a week if you are a beginner but need to start with a few, right?
So, I’ve created this post consider those things in my mind. I wanted to prepare a list, some SEO specifics that you need to take care of while writing and this post entails everything you need.
So, as I understand it’s all about writing the new contents each week in form of blogs and articles and optimize them perfectly from SEO point of view, the below to-do’s consist the steps from starting to finish for a particular content and what you need to take care of in there.
1. Choose a Topic:
Of course, that’s necessary right? Please make sure we are choosing the relevant topic which is useful for the audience and is relevant to what we do.
2. Do an in-depth keyword research:
This is must. When you select a topic, always make sure you do a little bit of research for the keywords. This is a very simple thing and you can do it through Google keyword planner.
- All you have to do is to search your topic in Google search and grab a list of competitors.
- Take some ideas as to what the competitors are using with respect to that topic.
- Get some ideas from there and write them down in a notepad or something.
- Use a tool like Google keyword planner or Ahrefs.com etc. and put those ideas in the tool.
- You will get a lots of keyword ideas that’ll be related to your topic.
- Choose the ones that you think you can use within your content.
- Make sure you are using long tail keywords as much as possible.
- Make sure the search count of the keywords is good as targeting low search count keywords won’t do any good.
3. Length of Content:
I know it sometimes depends on the situations but if we could make sure the length of content, that’d be great. Content with 500 words would be good enough to start with and we can maximize it as needed but I would recommend to write at least 1000 words in a content.
The reason being is that search engines prefer long content and as much as you can write, will be a good thing.
4. Keyword Density:
This actually is a thing to discuss and I would like to sit together with some SEO experts to figure out that one.
The real confusion is how and in what form we should use the keywords in content and how the density would be calculated?
Now, if I go in a genuine way, my expertise says the density of a keyword should not exceed than 4 to 5 times in content but if you go through the Yoast SEO plugin, there’s a myth as mentioned below:
- If you are using a single word as a focus keyword, it should be used approx. 8 times in a content worth of 1000 words.
- If you using a two phrase keyword as a focus keyword, it should be used approx. 5 times in a content worth of 1000 words.
- If you are using a three or four phrase keyword, it should be used approx. 2 to 3 times in a content worth of 1000 words.
So, when you have a list of keywords you need to include in content, it’s really confusing. One main confusion is as to how you should use keywords?
You may be in a situation where you find these keywords to be used in a content:
Broadcast media agency
Broadcast media relations
Broadcast PR Agency
Broadcast Media
If you go and use all of these keywords in 3 to 4 times separately, that will make it over optimized and the word “Broadcast” would be used about 16 times, which will be complete spam.
So, what I really think is we should divide the keywords in a single phrase and use them about 3 to 4 times.
Having that said, as we see Broadcast is used in all 4 keywords above so just take it as it is one and limit it’s density 4 times maximum.
It also depends on our intelligence as to how we are using these keywords and giving the sentences and content a good sense.
5. Choose a Eye Catching Post Title:
A title tells so much about anything. Take a movie, a book or anything; you will have an idea what it is all about just by reading the title.
So, always make sure you are creating an eye-catching title for your post. It should be descriptive, explain the topic and also should contain the keywords we have.
Please make sure the title should not be too lengthy. It should be short but on the topic.
6. Use Appropriate Images and add Alt Text on them:
Never forget about using the images in the content. A picture speaks more than words and adding image to content would always be a great idea.
Use images that are relevant to the content and its theme.
Do not copy images from other websites; it’ll be a copyright issue.
Create new images and use 100% stock free and authentic images.
Once you have images added in the content, make sure you are adding the appropriate alt texts for each image. Alt texts are something that tells search engines as to what an image is all about as search engines cannot read images.
So, it’s always a great idea of adding keyword rich anchor texts to the images in order to improve the ranking for a particular keyword.
Do not use a single keyword as alt texts multiple times, but rather use a keyword only one time as alt text.
7. Use Heading Tags (H1, H2, H3 etc.):
Normally, the blog title is automatically set to H1 so I think there’s no need to add more h1 tags in content, but we need to make sure we are using different h2, h3 tags in the content.
Having that said, your content is divided in different paragraphs and you need to write headings for each paragraph, telling people what a paragraph is all about.
We can use multiple h2 and h3 tags in content, but it depends on us as to how we are using them in content. Just make sure you are using your targeted keywords in the heading tags as it’s pretty important. (The keywords you did research for at the very beginning, before writing the content.)
8. Internal Linking:
Internal linking is all about linking the content with other pages in the site by using the appropriate anchor texts. However, the real question is, how do you find those anchor texts in your content.
Here’s what you need to do:
- Go through the complete website and its pages and figure out what every page is all about. I suppose you are very well aware with the website and it’s different pages and what keyword represent a particular page, right?
- Once you know that, try to read out the complete content again and mark the ones you feel could match to the other pages in your site. For an instance, it may be possible that you have a word “pizza” in the content and there could be a separate article or page which tells about Pizza.
- Once you have done this, just link the appropriate page using the appropriate anchor text.
- This is not so hard if we do this and if you keep doing this on regular basis, you’ll know it in a very short time.
9. Use Appropriate Meta Title and Description:
There’s always an option in each website or whatever platform you use i.e. WordPress, html, Wix, Shopify, Squarespace etc. to edit the SEO in form of title/description tag which tells search engines as to what a page is all about.
It’s a snippet which will appear in the Google search result when someone search for that particular page, or a keyword that ranks for that page.
So, adding title/description tags in a post/page is necessary.
In WordPress, you use a plugin called Yoast SEO through which you edit the title/description tags.
While working on the blog post, normally, the title tag should always be the title of your article or blog post but you can change it as you feel suitable. There’s no rule of using the same title tag as the post title.
You worked on the keyword research part at the very beginning; now, it’s time to use that in title/description tag.
You need to consider all of those keywords and create a title and description based on those keywords which should also describe as to what a blog post is all about.
Now, you may think how would it possible to use keywords in the tags and still describing the blog post, right? Well, this completely depends on us and how we should use that. We need to be creative of creating the title/description tags and making sure we are using the keywords in them we did research for in the beginning.
Please make sure:
Title should be of 56 characters
Description should be of 156 characters, not more than that.
10. Set a Focus Keyword:
I don’t know about the other platforms but Yoast ask you to set a focus keyword for each page or blog post.
So, you need to select a focus keyword for each blog post. Just make sure you are setting a keyword as a focus keyword which is completely related to the topic.
When you set a keyword as a focus keyword, Yoast will ask you to check and verify a few things as whether the keyword is present in the content, in url, title/description tags etc. so you need to do it on your own.
I have created this document based on my experience and how I use to work on a blog post, so fell free to add your comments and let me know if there’s any further query.
