0 tips for an awesome and SEO-friendly

blog post
20 October 2020 | 12 Comments | Tags Blog SEO, Blogging, Content SEO, SEO
Basics, SEO Copywriting

Marieke van de Rakt

Marieke van de Rakt is the CEO of Yoast. Her main focus is on growing the
company. She is really passionate about maintaining open and friendly
company culture. Marieke is also heavily involved in the marketing of Yoast and
with Yoast SEO Academy: the online courses platform.

Writing blog posts requires skill. To keep your reader interested, you
should think about the structure of your content and keep it enjoyable. If
people like and understand an article, they will be much more inclined to
share it with others – and that will increase your rankings. So, if you want
to improve your rankings, improve your writing skills. Start with these tips
on how to write an SEO-friendly blog post!

Table of contents

 Before you start: do keyword research

 Writing tips for SEO-friendly blog posts

o 1. Think before you write!

o 2. Devise a structure for your post

o 3. Use paragraphs and headings

o 4. Use transition words

 o 5. Use related keywords

o 6. Optimize the length of your article

o 7. Link to existing content

o 8. Let other people read your post

o 9. Add content regularly

o 10. Use our Yoast SEO plugin

 Conclusion

For some, writing for SEO purposes and writing to attract and captivate your
audience seem like two conflicting goals. I totally disagree. Sure, the words you
want to be found for should be in a prominent place if you want an SEO-friendly
blog post. But, over-using keywords severely hampers the readability of your
text, which you definitely don’t want to do. In fact, a high keyphrase density can
even be a signal to Google that you might be stuffing keywords in your text,
and this can negatively affect your rankings.

This post provides tips on writing blog posts that are SEO-friendly and readable.
These two goals should always go hand in hand as we believe that writing in
understandable language gets you more visitors and keeps them on your site.

Master SEO copywriting and other vital SEO skills by getting  Yoast SEO academy
Premium. This gives you access to all our courses and the Yoast SEO Premium
plugin!

Before you start: do keyword research

Before you start writing, you have to do keyword research. If you want to
dominate the search results, you’ll have to figure out which words your
audience actually searches for. These are the topics you should write about and
the keywords you should use in your text.

When you’ve done your keyword research and have a list of focus keywords to
write about, it’s time to get writing. Here are 10 tips to help you end up with an
awesome blog post!

Writing tips for SEO-friendly blog posts

Above all, your blog post has to be a good piece of writing. When starting a
new blog post, many bloggers just start writing, typing whatever comes into
their heads. While this may work for some people who have natural writing
talents, others may need some help. Personally, I always follow these ‘rules’
when I write a new blog.

1. Think before you write!

Before you start, think carefully about the message of your piece. What do you
want to tell your readers, or which central question do you want to answer?
What’s the purpose of your article? And what do you want your readers to do at
the end of the page? Write down the answers to these questions before you
begin and think about the search intent someone may have. An easy way to get
an insight into this is by looking at the search results for the search term you
want to rank with.

2. Devise a structure for your post

To write a readable and SEO-friendly blog post, you need to create a clear
structure. This means that every post should have:

 some sort of introduction (in which you introduce your topic);

 a body (in which the main message is written);

 a conclusion (in which you summarize the main ideas or draw a

conclusion).

In a few sentences, write down what you want to say in all three sections. You’ve
now created of summary of your post. This will help you create a structured and
readable blog post. Now the real writing can begin.

3. Use paragraphs and headings

Everybody uses paragraphs, but not everybody uses them well. Don’t start each
new sentence on a new line just because it looks nice. Also, try not to make
them too lengthy, as each paragraph should have its own idea or subject. Ask
yourself what the main idea of each paragraph is. You should be able to
summarize that main idea in one sentence. If that’s not possible and you need
more sentences to explain the main idea, you simply need to use more
paragraphs.
Proper headings also help your readers understand what a specific part of your
text is about. If you want people to find their way through your articles, use
subheadings to lead them, help them scan your page, and clarify the structure
of your articles. They’re not just important for readability, but for SEO as well.
That’s why I would also advise using your keyword in some of the subheadings. I
do mean some of them, as using your keyword in every heading will make the
text clunky and unnatural. This will put people off reading further.

4. Use transition words

Transition words help people scan through your text and understand the
relationship between sentences and paragraphs. For example, let’s say that
there are three reasons for people to buy your product. You should use signal
words like: ‘first of all’; ‘secondly’ and ‘finally’. Also, words like ‘however’,
‘similarly’ and ‘for example’ give a clear signal to your readers. Readers will
instantly get that a conclusion will follow after words like ‘to sum up’ or ‘in
short’. Transition words are therefore very important to add structure to your
text.

5. Use related keywords

Stuffing your article with your focus keyword makes it less attractive to read, but
it can also hurt your rankings. Google is getting smarter, and it wants you to
write content that users will love. It doesn’t want you to use your focus keyword
in every other sentence and has other ways to analyze what your text is about.
One of the ways that Google understands the topic of your text is by
recognizing synonyms and other keywords that are related to your focus
keyphrase. That’s why you should use synonyms and related
keywords throughout your copy.

Synonyms are relatively easy to think of, but thinking of the right related
keywords is a bit more challenging. That’s why we’ve introduced a new feature
in our plugin that helps you find related keyphrases right away. Based on your
focus keyword, our plugin can generate a number of related keyphrases with
the click of a button! Along with how many times that keyword is searched for
and what the search trend looks like. This feature is powered by SEMrush and
can be used in both our free and Premium plugin. So use this related keyphrase
feature!

6. Optimize the length of your article

Make sure your blog posts have a minimum of 300 words but keep the length
of your article balanced. Google likes long articles, however, if your article is too
long it can scare users away. I would advise to only write long articles when you
know you’re a skilled writer. It’s asking a lot of your visitors to read your entire
post when it’s lengthy. Check out this article if you’re not quite sure how long a
blog post should be. And remember to keep using your focus keyphrase
throughout your text to make sure you end up with an SEO-friendly blog post!

7. Link to existing content

If you’ve already written content on the same topic as your current post, don’t
forget to link to and from these posts. It will make your new blog post, and the
existing posts, stronger because you’re showing authority on the subject. As
well as that, your link structure is also important for your rankings in Google.
And let’s not forget that linking to other content about a subject is great for
your readers, as they may be interested in reading these related posts too. It
helps them navigate your site.

We call this internal linking and both your readers and Google will thank you for
it. It helps them manage your content and understand relationships between
different content on your site, so take some time to link to and from your
previous content. Our internal linking tool can help you by suggesting relevant
pages and posts on your site that you can link to.

8. Let other people read your post

Before publishing your post, make sure to let someone else read it first. Ask
them whether they understand the main concept of your post and invite them
to correct any typos and grammatical errors. This can help you by providing an
objective view of the readability and attractiveness of your text. If you have
someone in your team who happens to be an expert on the topic you’re writing
about, make sure to run your post past them. That way they can check whether
you’re covering everything you need to and give suggestions to make your post
even better.

9. Add content regularly

Regularly adding new blog posts to your website tells Google that your website
is alive. This is important because if your site isn’t active, Google will crawl it less
often and this might negatively affect your rankings. But don’t just post for the
sake of posting. Make sure that everything you post is high-quality content:
informative, well-written articles that entertain readers and fit their search intent.
If you have difficulty posting on a regular base, it might be a great idea to
create an editorial calendar for your blog. This allows you to structure this
process in a way that fits you and your team.

10. Use our Yoast SEO plugin

The analysis tool in our Yoast SEO plugin helps you write readable and SEO-
friendly blog posts. Start by choosing the most important search term you want
people to find this particular page for. This is your focus keyphrase and after
you fill this in our plugin runs all kinds of checks to see whether your post is
optimized or still needs improving:

 Our plugin checks your post to see whether you’ve used the keyphrase in
the right places, like your copy, title, meta description, alt text and URL.
Yoast SEO Premium also recognizes different word forms of your
keyphrase.

 It gives you suggestions for related keyphrases that you can add to boost
the quality and relevance of your content.

 It checks the readability of your text: Are your sentences or paragraphs

too long? Do you use transition words?

 It checks the internal and external links in your article. Yoast SEO

Premium even provides suggestions for links to related articles on your
site.

 It calculates how often you use your keyphrase throughout your text: not
enough or too often? When you have Premium it also checks if
you’ve distributed your keyphrase evenly throughout your post.

 It also checks if other pages on your website use the same focus
keyword, to prevent you from competing with yourself.

If you write a relatively SEO-friendly blog post (based on the aspects discussed
above) the plugin will indicate this with a green bullet. Posts and pages with
green bullets will help you improve the ranking of the pages on your website.

Note that not every dot has to be green for the overall SEO score to be good.
For instance, these are the results of this post, which does have an overall green
bullet for our focus keyphrase “SEO-friendly blog post”:
 Analysis results as shown in the Yoast
SEO sidebar
Kind of a cool way to get feedback on your content, right? When you use
the Yoast SEO plugin you’ll find this feedback in the Yoast SEO sidebar next to
your post and in the Yoast meta box under your post (while editing). If you’re
interested in learning more about all the aspects this analysis tool looks at, read
our article on how to use the Yoast SEO content analysis tool.
Conclusion
The days when a few SEO tricks were enough to get your website to rank well in
Google are long gone. Nowadays, quality content is king. And good content
also leads to more links, shares, tweets and returning visitors to your website. Of
course, there are always other things you can do to maximize the SEO
friendliness of your post, but the most important thing is to just write very, very
good posts! Still not sure if your blog post is ready to publish? Take a look
at this checklist for your blog post to make sure you’re good to go!