If you are already writing a blog, it’s quite possible you might already be aware of few basics of Search Engine Optimization techniques. But if you don’t.. then don’t worry this article will make you aware of all the aspects of optimizing a blog post for Search Engines.
Truly speaking what I have researched so far about SEO in past years of my blogging, I can tell you for sure.. “always try to write with a natural flow, write for the viewers and not for the search engines”
Google’s bots know well which article is grammatically accurate and which one is manipulated for SEO. Surprised?? don’t be.. Let’s move forward to know what can we do for optimizing our article.
How To Optimize Blog Posts For Search Engines
Salient points to keep in mind before start writing a blog post:
1). H1 should be used only once in a post, in case of wordpress blog title is by default h1 and you can’t use H1 anywhere in the post.
Your main keywords must come in the H1.
2). Use H2 afterwards for your next heading, for wordpress users H2 is the first heading you can use. You must use main target keyword in H2 for better Search Ranking
3). Use keyword in the first 150 words
4). Make sure you do not use the keywords many times that it start spoiling the meaning of the sentence. Just try to use them naturally in the sentence.
5). Use focus keyword in ‘alt’ tag of the image. Also do not forget to use atleast 1 image in the article to improve your visibility through ‘image search results‘
6). If you are using meta tags then do not forget to add the keywords in the meta title and meta description.
7). Use h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 in descending order and do not repeat h2 and h1 in your article.
8). Try to write your post in between 500 to 2500 words
9). Use keywords only wherever you find necessary. Unnecessarily using the keywords in post can be marked by search engines as spam.
10). Link other related articles and site sources wherever necessary, it could help increase your domain authority and higher the authority higher you will get preference in search engine ranking.
This Video explains how does google works (created by the google itself)
Criteria followed by Search Engines:
1). Prominence of the keyword
How early in a page keyword appears
2). Preference of the tags for finding keyword
- Search engines start looking for keywords from the page title (meta title),
- then it finds the keyword in the post url
- then it goes to page description (meta description),
- after that it goes to heading tags in the article, priority wise it first goes to h1 to find the keyword (in case of wordpress h1 is same as page title),
- then it finds the keyword in the first two paragraphs of the article,
- then it goes further to the next headings and the contents written after the headings and so on..
3). Frequency of the keyword searched
Number of times a keyword appearing in an article. Be careful placing the keywords, as i suggested before do not place them unnecessarily, but use them carefully and naturally in the sentences other wise your article might reach the spam list of search engines.
4). Site Popularity
Few search engines these days give priority to the popular sites and the number of times a article is liked and reshared over the social media.
5).Grammatical structure of post
Some engines including Google consider grammar in their ranking calculation. Google bots are capable of distinguishing between a overly optimized article and a naturally written article.
6). Synonyms
Most of the search engines these days finds the synonyms in the article and treat them as the keyword itself. So you can use synonyms of your focus keywords in your article and google will find it with the original keyword
These were the most important points and criterions followed by the search engines these days to rank a particular post in the search results. Do keep them in mind before you start writing your article and you will definitely see your article in the top ranking withing a week or two.
Conclusion
The conclusion of this article is that we must not write articles for Search engines, but should write it for the readers, just keeping in mind the aforementioned salient points. If done properly search engines will automatically find your article for the top ranks.
Since Google is earning its major incomes from SEM or paid ads, there is not much left for SEO and now what matters most is the quality of the content, since the google bots are able to read the content and understands whether the article is about the searched keyword or not.
Thus each of us need to focus on the content and the keyword finding preference list of the search engines to rank on the top of the results.
Make sure your articles are well indexed in the google and other search engines then only search engines will be able to find your articles for ranking. You can use google search console or other webmaster tools to index your website.
Drop your valuable comments. Do not forget to SHARE
