7 Surefire Tips To Write A Perfect Blog Post
Over the past several months I've collected a ton of good resources about how to write a perfect blog post. So I thought it’s better to do a mashup than simply rewriting/reposting what’s already said in the blogosphere. So I’ll be focusing on writing a blog post that’s well optimized and that attracts search engine and social media love.
As you probably know, there are a lot of bloggers who write really awesome content but the problem is their blog posts are not so optimized. The reason could be they don’t care about SEO much or they are not so tech-savvy so they don’t know how to optimize their blog posts. Hence I believe that this blog post will also help the not so tech-savvy bloggers (food blogs, personal blogs) so that they can optimize their existing and future blog posts to skyrocket the traffic.
In A Nutshell: 7 Steps To A Perfectly Optimized Blog Post
- Write An Alternate Title And Make It Your H1 Tag
- Use Sub-headings (H1 – H3 tags) & Bullet Points
- Interlink Your Blog Posts
- Link Out To Other Blog Posts
- Write A Nice Meta Description
- Use Relevant & Quality Images
- Add Google Authorship
1. Write An Alternate Title And Make It Your H1 Tag
When you have done an in-depth blog post after the necessary keyword research and competitor analysis you can think about two titles (in fact the 2nd one is the H1 tag). WordPress (and some other content management systems) by default assumes that your Title tag and H1 are the same and there’s no option to change it. Tip: What are <h1> to <h6> Tags?
But if you’re using Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin (or other SEO plugins) then you can write a custom <Title> tag from your WordPress dashboard. It’s useful when you want to write two versions of the same title – one should be search optimized and other one should be user friendly.
If your blog is an authority one then it won’t be a problem but otherwise it’s somewhat difficult to write a title that’s both user-friendly and search optimized. If it’s user-friendly then there’s less space to add the targeted keywords and if it’s a search optimized title then it may be boring to users.
And Google will either show your Title tag or the H1 tag as the title of your blog post in search result pages. In my blog the title that you’re seeing within the blog post is actually the H1 tag and the title that you’re seeing on the task bar (or your web browser tab) is the <Title> tag. When people share your blog post on social media it’s mostly the <Title> tag.
2. Use Sub-headings (H1 – H3 tags) & Bullet Points
Like I've mentioned, people don’t actually read your blog posts they scan through it. You've to make your blog posts more readable by using subheadings and bullet points. Why? Because it improves the user experience as it’s easier to read subheadings and bullet points than just paragraphs. And your readers will know what they will get without reading the entire paragraphs. For example, you split a single blog post into several sections using subheadings and bullet points even if they’re closely related.
Use heading tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6) effectively. H1 tag is the most important and H6 is the least important heading in a page. And remember, you can have multiple H2 – H6 tags but it’s a best practice to limit to one H1 tag per page.
3. Interlink Your Blog Posts
If you want to increase the ranking of your blog posts then make sure that your blog posts are interlinked. Internal linking not only means that your pages must be reachable from your homepage but it also means that the inner pages must be linking to each other. When you’re linking your own internal pages you’re actually passing link juice to those pages thereby increasing its ranking.
4. Link Out To Other Blog Posts
Even if you’re linking to a competitor it doesn't mean that you won’t outrank them. Since search engines use 100s of signals to rank a webpage so you may outrank your competitor even if you’re linking to them.
And it doesn't mean that when you’re writing a blog post you should link to your competitor who has covered the same topic. If that is the case then it means that you’re giving a vote to your competitor for the current topic and it will boost their ranking. Instead you can use the following linking strategy. For example, this blog post is about “How To Write A Blog Post” so as you can see I’m not linking to any of those pages that are exactly about the same topic but I've linked to a ton of other quality resources that’s highly relevant to the context.
It’s annoying if you've mentioned a website or reviewed a product but are not willing to link to it. After all the web is all about links. We want to offer the best user experience possible so feel free to link to other websites.
5. Write A Nice Meta Description
Meta description tags don’t impact your search engine rankings directly but they can significantly improve the click-through-rate in search engine results pages. If your blog post is missing the meta description tag then search engines will automatically show an excerpt from your page. But if you write a meta description then search engines will show it when it’s relevant to the context.
6. Use Relevant & Quality Images
A picture is worth a thousand words and it requires no further explanation. That’s the reason why infographic is very popular these days because it’s engaging and presents the data in a nice way. I always try to use high quality images and I love to show branded images. Also, unless it’s something exclusive or proprietary I don’t insert any watermarks. You can read the ultimate guide to web images to learn the best practices.
And here’s a list of over 20 websites to get free stock photos for your blog.
7. Add Google Authorship
Google+ Authorship allows you to verify your identity and establish authority. It improves the search quality as authorship information can be used to differentiate human-generated content and spam or low quality content. Also, it helps you stand out in search results thereby increasing the click-through rate. If you haven’t claimed your Google authorship yet then read its definitive guide here.
Also, learn how to claim your Bing authorship click here
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8. Write In-depth Articles
Last year Google released a new feature called “In-depth articles“. The idea is to highlight quality in-depth content in Google search results as their research indicated that 10% of users needed in-depth content. So optimize your blog for the “In-depth articles” feature and write in-depth articles whenever you can. To know more about it here
Conclusion
If you know a better resource than any of the recommendations then let me know and I’ll replace it. Just make sure that it’s not so advanced so that newbie bloggers and non-tech-savvy users will also find it useful.
Have I missed something or is there any other resource that you’d like to suggest? If so, let me know as a comment below! 
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