How to Create the Perfect SEO Blog Post

1. SEO Blog Post Guide: Ever wondered what type of content gets top ranks on Google? Websites, blogs, products, and services are growing fast. There are so many website builders that just about anyone can have their own website up and running within the day. You need an edge to outrank your competitors. On the surface, it may seem difficult to know why certain content ranks better. There are many SEO factors involved, and one of them is SEO focused blog posts and articles. The reality is that these high-ranking pages all follow a certain template. It doesn't matter which niche the principles of SEO content are the same. Once you know what it is, you will see it everywhere in your internet browsing experience. In this class, I will reveal to you how to create the perfect SEO blog post. You'll be able to know the difference between non ranking pages and pages that get Google's attention and are consistently ranked in the top positions. Here's what you'll learn in this class. I'll reveal the importance of using blogs in ranking on Google, you'll discover the most important elements of an SEO blog post. And I'll share with you my number one technique for generating article outlines. At the end of this lesson, you will know how to check your competitors and create blog posts that are better optimized for rankings. Joined the class and let's start preparing your SEO content. 2. The Importance of Blog Posts: Blogposts have become a marketing tool, what our website is offering a product or a service. Blogs are being used to attract visitors from Google and convert them to potential clients. This means that you, as a website owner and creator of blogposts, are faced with two challenges in all of your articles. Firstly, you need to write your article in a way that interests the right people. An article that puts people off will not help you at all. In fact, it will damage your ranking potential because when a user stays a really short time on your webpage, this signals to Google that the page is worthless and a worthless page will not get rewarded with rankings. When writing your article, you need to remember that an actual person will be reading it. Now secondly, you need to write your article in a way that's easy to understand for Google's crawlers. This means that you need to write your content in a way that makes it easy to understand for artificial crawlers. So essentially, for a computer code, that's the challenge, capturing people's attention while writing directly for a computer code to analyze. Now this may sound tough, but there is an easy way that you can produce better content than your competitors and attract the right people while being written specifically for Google crawlers. But before we continue, you have to understand that your blog post is not just text. You need to understand the main elements that make up a blog post. Once you know the elements, it will be a lot easier to prepare your article when your blog post is written correctly, you can expect many benefits for your ranking potential, such as you will always be targeting a primary keyword you aim to rank for on Google. As you will include all the relevant complimentary keywords known as secondary keywords. Well, you will have a chance to run for more organic keywords on Google. Visitors will stay on your website longer. And this will signal to Google's crawlers that your website is full of valuable content. It's a strong ranking factor. As your blog posts will contain the relevant SEO elements, Google's crawlers will understand the context of your article and no, for which search queries to rank your webpage. In short, SEO optimized blog posts will boost your ranking potential. So let's now go over some examples of the good, the bad, and the ugly blogposts. 3. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Blog Posts Good and Bad Blog Posts: Welcome back. In this lesson, I want to examine a few blog posts. First, I want to bring your attention to the National Library of Medicine. Let's have a look at this blog post. Now scrolling down, what do you see? I mean, for me, I just see huge blocks of text everywhere. This is very not user-friendly. Anybody who sees this, they rather look for something. Unless there are 100% interested in this topic, they will look for something different, something easier on the eyes. I mean, when I look at this, it's sort of reminds me of high-school and writing articles for English lessons or for university articles. Sure, it is divided into sections with good titles. But I wanted to show you because this is just really, really ugly. I mean, it may be optimized and may have a lot of the relevant keywords. But the thing is, you also want to optimize your content for an actual person who will sit in front of their computer and read the article. And this is not it out. Classify this as a really, really ugly article. Let's compare this to another page. Okay, So we have a title, an image. Let's see how this looks. Scrolling down, I would say this looks a little bit better, but just a little bit better. I mean, we still have a lot, a lot of texts, but the difference is here. I mean, the titles, I think they're more visible. Perhaps there are more paragraphs in the, in the previous blog. And we have images from time-to-time and these little quotes sections, the content is definitely divided. It's a little bit better. But I would say there's still a lot to go to optimize the blog post for a positive user experience. Now why am I focused so much on user experience? Well, let me explain it to you. Youtube, Facebook, tiktok, and a lot of the other platforms are ruining people's attention spans and it's applies across the globe. Although the social medias are sort of useful and we have gotten used to them for all major events and quick communications and stories. However, the side effect is that they sabotage a person's ability to remain focused on one item for an extended period of time. If somebody is searching for information about a relevant topic and let's say they have, they have a choice. They can go to YouTube, watch a video, or come to this page and read this full article. Well, they will go to the video because it's less time. They will save more time rather than sit back and spend the next, say, 1015 minutes reading an article. The reason this is important is that you are competing against people's attention spans. And you need to write your blog posts in a way that you will instantly hooked the person so that they invest the time and read your article. And I would say that this article here, this is not the way to do it. It's better. It's a step forward from the so-called a book report. But let me show you another example which I think, again, it's more positive. Here we are on the third blog posts that I wanted to show you. I've had to open this in a different browser because, well, this blogposts, it has a downside if you open it just on Google Chrome without an ad blocker. While there are a lot of ads and ads are not great for user experience, some odds, of course, you want to monetize your content, but if there are too many ads is just intrusive. But I wanted to show you this article for the content and for the layout. So it starts off with a title, iPhone 14, all the rumors and leaks so far, it's short and to the point, it will capture the attention of anyone interested in the iPhone. And the first bit of content is just one sentence. Purpose of the sentence is to hook the person so that they scroll down and investing more time into reading the actual content. Let's have a look how this looks like. One thing which immediately pops into my mind is that the content area is not as wide as the previous blog posts, which is a good thing. And it's a good thing because it's easier on the eyes and it's easier to read. I mean, these lines, they only have about 123. About, let's say 12 words per line. If you compare it to this article or this article, you see that it's much, much more words per line and it just means it's more difficult read. Next, what I like about this article is that while there is a lot of content, but if you look at it, everything is divided into paragraphs, into short paragraphs. There are lots of headings in-between. The content is divided by images as well. Now this type of content gets read more because on the surface, it looks much, much easier to read. And as I scroll down the page, you can see that it's not just blocks of texts. You frequently see breaks into content through images, headings, anchor texts which are links to other pages. And this is an example of a really good blog post. Now let's compare it to one which I believe is the top rated blog post. We start off heading and an image moving down the content area, it's not too wide. And what I really like about this is that immediately look at these two lines of text, three lines of text, one line of text. Very, very short, designs to be non-threatening so that a user sits and can easily read this. Then we've got big titles, images, bullet points. As you can see the content. The way that it is formatted is that there are lots of differences. It's not just text, text, text. It's divided. To show you how far we have gone. I mean, just scroll down. You can see how the text is divided, it's formatted. You see frequent breaks in the text and are compared directly to the first example that I showed you. This just looks very, very, I mean, this just looks like a difficult read or something like this. It's nice, it's easy. And I also liked the structure of their articles. You can just go to the section. You know exactly what to read. Now that you know the type of article blog posts that you should be aiming to write. In the next lesson, let's briefly go over some of the main elements that make up a good blog post, although I've already covered some of them. In the next lesson, I want to particularly draw your attention to all of the elements that you need to include in your SEO blog post. I'll see you then. 4. Features of an SEO Blog Post: In this lesson, I want to discuss the features or elements of our FeO blog post. The first element is headings. I am referring to headings that divides the article intersection. So we have the main heading tag here. Then we have another heading here. Another heading here. So it's dividing the article. It's like providing a structure for the articles. We have a heading here then a subheading to this section here. These headings, as I mentioned, they provide the structure for the article which is very, very useful for a Google crawler. So by this, I mean that each has LINQ uses the correct heading tag, whether it's H1, H2, H3, and so on. Now to figure out which heading tags were used in this article, I'm going to use the SEO meta in one-click plugin. So I just click on it. Go to Headers. Here I have the heading structure of this entire article. So as you can see, everything is nicely organized. And this part is very important for the Google crawler. Because of this, they will understand the context of your article. The next section is short paragraphs. So short and frequent paragraphs are much easier to read. This element, short paragraphs is focused on your customers so that when they see your content, they are not threatened by it. So they do not see just blocks full of texts, but they see paragraphs that are inviting for the user to read. That it doesn't appear as holders like a massive commitment to read the content. Next, we have images. This is a very important element, especially for the Google crawlers. This article could potentially have a little bit more images. Images allow you to add keywords into the image, alt tags. Now this is very helpful to Google crawlers as alt tag keywords, they add context to your article. It's your chance to communicate with the crawler what your article is about. Let's examine how the attacks have been used here, just click on SEO meta. Go to images. You can see here that not all the images have alt tags. But I think the main images that are in the main content area, they have the alt tags included. As you can see, these alt tags, they provide context. It's something that you should incorporate it in your SEO blog post. Next, we have bullet points. Bullet points while drug this article, we have a lot of bullet points sections, and these are purely visual. They make the content easier to read. So the main focus here is the readability for the visitors. Moving on, we have internal links. Internal links are important and I think this is one element that this article is locking. Because the internal links, they come and they look like anchor text, something like this. But this leads to Facebook. So this is not a great example of what I'm looking for. We go to this page. This is an example of an internal link. It goes to another page on the actual blog post. Now, this internal links are important because they inform Google about the hierarchy of your website. For example, if you create a lot of content that is linked to one page, well, that one-page will be viewed by a Google crawler as the most important page on Google. That's the page that will rank higher than all the other pages. It is very useful to spread out and use internal links throughout your blog posts. Next, I want to talk about the author bio section. This is what I'm referring to. If we scroll to the top, we have the author and when the article was published. But the authors can also be in the bottom. We have the altar name, and if we click on it, we go to the author bio section. I believe it was also available on this article. Here it is altered by our section when it was published. And then scrolling down, we have more information about the author. There is a debate as to the impact of an author bio on search rankings. Some say it has a positive impact. Other people say it's completely irrelevant. I believe the truth lies somewhere in-between. So at this moment, it is a good SEO practice to make sure that you have an author bio section. It's like the default practice at this moment, all the major blocks are doing it. So I highly recommend that you also adopt this. Finally, the last element I want to bring to your attention is the metal title and description. Now this is not actually visible on your page, the Meta title and description, it's what is visible on Google search engine results page. Now if your content is missing this, then Google will just generate something random. And that's not advisable because the Google search results page is basically a chance for you to stand out against your competitors. You can promote your webpage. You have to make sure that you include a suitable or catchy title and irrelevant description. If you click on SEO methane, one-click, here's the title and here's the description. Whenever somebody types in a relevant keyword and this article appears. This is what will be visible in Google's search results page. Now that you know the elements of our SEO, optimize blogposts, let me show you how to prepare a draft and make the process of writing your articles very easy. 5. How to Create an SEO Blog Post Draft: Well done for making it this far in the class. Now that you know what to look for in a good SEO blog post, we can move on to answer the following questions. What keywords should you include in your article? How many times should you include each keyword? How many headings are you going to use? What other organic keywords will you include in your blog post? How long should your article BY, and how many images will you include? My simple answer to these questions is, why reinvent the wheel? If something is already working great, let's use it to our advantage and start from there. So instead of trying to figure out everything from scratch in this lesson, I want to show you how to develop a proven template for your blog post. And I'm talking about a template that is already ranking on Google. For this, you will need an SEO tool and it's called surfer SEO. And what it does is it analyzes the top ranking pages on Google for a particular keyword and generates for you a draft with writing guidelines. Let me show you how this looks right now. This is an example of an actual draft that was generated through surfer. So no actual content based. Basically all I did is I typed in the main keyword, which was car battery keeps dying. And it's analyzed the top competitors and generated for me I Accountant draft, as you can see here. Before I go into any details, let me just show you here. I'll go to Settings. Here we have our organic competitors and we see the top Google search results for the keyword, car battery keeps dying. The search is for the UK market. What we do here is we have a look at these website and if they are relevant, we highlight them. We make sure that this is turned on. If the article or the search result is not relevant, we turn it off. So this is useful, for instance, if you are writing a blog post and informational posts and some of the results in Google search or about product pages or maybe an About Us page. Well, this is not, this is not a direct competitor to your content, so you would switch it off. As you can see, we have the top results here. We see the quality of their content score because the surfer crawler analyzes the content and it also analyzes the page authority and the word count. So what we do is we highlight the main competitors. We then we can click on, let's go. Then surfer will take into consideration all of the content in these articles. The length of it, that the headings, paragraphs everything and will generate the draft for you. Now let's move on. I'll show you a bit more information about this. So here we have the content structure. We feed that the average words are 1447. That's something that you should aim for. We have a breakdown of how many headings to use, how many paragraphs and how many images. Now, here is a very important section because it analyzes the content so well that you get a list of all of the secondary keywords. These are the additional keywords that you will use in your content and then potentially you will be ranking for them on Google, the car battery keeps dying. This is your main organic keywords that the whole articles focused on. And then over here you have your secondary keywords. Now moving down, we have popular topics and questions. You can go through. All of these, highlight the ones that are most relevant. But these are popular topics and questions that people are asking. So by using any of these, you know, this is content that people want to know the answers to it. So by following these guidelines, using these topics, you can create content for people. It's content that people want to read. And additionally, you follow the call structure that is recommended here. You'll create content that's targeted at Google crawlers as well. Let's just click on, let's go. Now, what happens here is you write content and then over here, your content score is updated. Here you have the average amount of words that you should include in your content. Here, once you create more headings, this all of this gets updated. This feature here is something I really liked because it's very useful. As you are creating your content. You're using the keywords they get filled up. So you have here which organic keywords you should use in your article. And it also tells you how many times you should use the keyword. It's very, very useful feature of surfer. Now we can also click on outline. We have The title, so this is well over here you see the titles that are being used by your competitors. We can click on some questions, some headings. So I'll all of this is to provide you with additional insight into what people are searching for, what your competitors are already writing about and what you can include in your own article. If you're not the one who's writing the article, what you can do, you can click here on share and create a shareable link. So you can use, you can paste this link and use it later, or you can share it with your content writer. And then they will have access to this content. They can write it. As the writing the article, everything gets updated. I really like this tool and it's actually a tool that is used by search agencies. So for professional SEO activities, a lot of them, they just rely on surfer. I mean, this is just one part of SEO. There are other parts like keyword research, technical analysis of the website. But when it comes to creating content that is specifically targeted for people and for Google crawlers, I find that well, surfer SEO, these drafts, they are really invaluable. 6. Summary and Where to Next: Welcome back. In the previous lesson, I showed you a tool that does all the so-called heavy lifting for you. It analyzes all your top competitors and prepares for you an outline to write your structured article. This outline includes Google crawler friendly content, whilst also including topics that are of interest to your potential audience. It's the best of both worlds. If you do not use surfer, you can create your own drafts, but you'll need to do more research and examine competitors manually. But in this class, you have learned the key elements that make up a winning SEO blog posts. You will be capable of creating your own drafts even without surfer. If you would like to learn more about keyword research and preparing a content plan, then I recommend you watch my other class titled create a winning SEO content marketing strategy. There is a link in the description below this video. However, if you want to dive deeper and get a more in-depth introduction to the whole topic of SEO, then I recommend you watch my other class called grow your search rankings. With SEO, you will learn the fundamental skills and techniques used in ranking websites. If you'd like to analyze your page for technical SEO issues, then you can visit my website, search operative.com forward slash SEO bonus. There are some other resources there, but the main video is all about running a crawler through your website and checking all your technicals. It's been a pleasure teaching you. And I hope my content has been interesting and that I've provided you with some actionable techniques for writing SEO blog posts. Good luck in your content strategy.