How to Write a SEO Optimized Blog Post

by admin | Aug 6, 2024 | Blog News - English, SEO

What is a blog?

A blog, short for weblog, is a frequently updated web page used for personal commentary or business media content. Blogs webpages normally contain posts/articles which are often interactive and include sections at the bottom where readers can leave comments or ask questions to make it interactive.

A blog is suitable for online personal news sharing where readers engagement is a paramount

What is blog content?

The blog content is post or article that are written on a blog. It can include content in the form of text, photos, infographics, or videos. Make sure you always have an engaging introduction, quality content, and a solid conclusion

Pre-Blog Post Writing

Before starting to write a post please consider the following:

1. Research your competitors by reading their posts to see what are they delivering to their audience for purpose of learning only. By doing so you will improve a lot your post writing skills
2. Make sure you have all the tools needed to write a post
3. Get refreshment, entertainment, comfort,
4. Improve your posts topic of preference from analytics. Analytics will show you the most read post and thus you will learn the most preferred topic. Build from their and write as many posts for that topic to boost you visits
5. Write Guest Post. Request to write posts for other websites to increase traffic to your website
6. Write posts on trending events related to your industry. Example if a great legendary leader or celebrity is visiting your location immediately write a post on that visit by integrating with your industry.
7. Allow others to write posts to your blog. Influence your friends and visitors who have hobbies of writing the blog to post something to your blog
8. Reference URL for 10 Steps to Become a Paid Online Article Writer

What are components of a good written blog post?

These are components of a blog post

• Highly Attention-Grabbing Headline
• A Compelling Short Description or Summary
• Useful Sub-Headings
• Adequate and Quality Engaging Description (Main body of your article)
• Appealing Graphics and Images
• Relevant Internal and Outbound Links
• Powerful Call-To-Action (CTA)
• Good Meta Description
• Audience Aware Content
• Get Others’ Opinions
• Publicize Your Post to External Outlets
• Inspiring Author biography with contacts

1)   Highly Attention-Grabbing Headline

Assume that you don’t have any other space to explain about your story and that you have only less than 60 characters including spaces to tell us your story and still being understood?

Your blog headline must contain the following:

1. Give summary of what your article is all about.
2. Inspire the reader to at least read the short description of your blog post.

In other words, it needs to be magnetic—it needs to pull people in.

Sometimes adding emotional words to the headline will give it the added magnetism required. In other cases, the information you’re offering will, on its own, be enough of a draw. However, even when you’re presenting great content, spice up your headline with a word or two that will grab readers and make it stand out. People are moved to act by their emotions.

2)  A Compelling Short Description or Summary

Just like the blog headline you don’t have much space to explain everything about your story and that you have only less than 160 characters including spaces to tell us your story and still being understood?

Your blog short description must contain the following:

1. Give summary of what your article is all about.
2. Inspire the reader to read the full description of your blog.

What is the word “compelling” mean in regard to this topic?

Compelling involve raising emotions, feeling, admiration, irresistibility about something ahead of the person. The first sentence or short paragraph of your blog must compel visitors to read your second paragraph—you want to draw your readers in. Don’t take forever to get to the point, and make sure there’s sufficient build up so that readers will want to know more about the information you’re presenting and appreciate it once they understand your ideas.

3)  Useful Sub-Headings

The quality of sub-headings must follow the same principle of Heading above

The sub-heading must be described in no more than 55 characters with spaces the underlying paragraphs

Subheads serve three purposes:

1. They break up the story to make it more visually appealing
2. They help your reader navigate to important sections of preference.
3. They increase points to specific keywords and hence boost search engine optimization (SEO).

A long page of continuous type turns away a lot of potential readers. We’ll come back to this in the section on graphics. Also, once readers finish your article, they may want to jump back and go over a point; subheads should help this.

Each sub heading must mention at least a word that is included in the primary page keyword.

4) Adequate and Quality Engaging Description

If the article or post of your blog is an EGG, then the body is the “YOLK” of your blog post. These aspects needed to be observed while writing your post body:

1. Simple language, never insert difficult or bombastic words
2. Organize your point in a logical manner
3. Correct grammar and spelling (best tool https://www.grammarly.com/ )
4. Don’t use only paragraphs throughout, sometimes use bullets to pinpoint important points
5. Use images or photos or video to illustrate important points
6. Always use links for reader further reference
7. Use sub-sub headings if needed and followed the correct hierarchy principle
8. Always have a second opinion about your writing

5)  Appealing Graphics and Images

It’s a great idea to include graphics in your blog posts to illustrate points and break up text within the body of articles to make your pages more visually pleasing. Google measures the time spent on your pages, so your graphics, typography, and color scheme should work together to encourage visitors to stick around. Also, when you promote your content on social media, you should include a visually interesting graphic.

6) Relevant Internal and Outbound Links

You should include relevant links to other articles on your site in every new article you write so that visitors will benefit while browsing your pages by getting all the information they need and for this case they spent more time in the page.

Internal links benefit your SEO because they increase the number of pages per visit, number of clicks and time visitors are on your site.

Outbound relevant links to authoritative sites on the other end are considered in the algorithms and do have a positive impact on rankings.”

“Linking to other websites is a great way to provide value to your users. Often, links help users to find out more, to check out your sources and to better understand how your content is relevant to the questions that they have.”

— John Mueller, Google

Does the content present information in a way that makes you want to trust it, such as clear sourcing, evidence of the expertise involved, background about the author or the site that publishes it, such as through links to an author page or a site’s About page?

— Google Webmaster Blog

The main thing to take away from this test is that although we don’t know and have not proved how powerful outgoing links are in the grand scheme of things, we have proved they do have a positive impact if used correctly.
More importantly, we disproved the old myth of Pagerank retention which in my opinion has done nothing but harm to the internet as a whole as webmasters try to keep the ‘link juice’ in house slowly eroding the building blocks of the web.

— Reboot Online

By summing up, this will increase visitors trust to your web page and will attract many to make trusted reference to others and for this case will increase the number of webpage visits, number of clicks and time visitors are on your site and thus adding more to your ranking points.

7)  Powerful Call-To-Action (CTA)

Almost every blog article should have some kind of call-to-action, which can take a variety of forms and be achieved through different tactics. Your first step is to decide what action you want your visitors to take. It might be to make a comment. It could be to read another blog on your site, or to check out a product or service you offer. You also could get a prospect’s contact information by offering exclusive content in exchange for an email address.

8) Good Meta Description

The meta description is the snippet Google displays in search results. Left to its own devices, Google will grab the first sentence or two from your article. This, however, may not always be the best way for your article to appear in search results.

9) Audience Aware Content

Now days you can use AI tools to convert your blog content to any international language via text or text to audio and then create some slideshow where you can post as video in YouTube etc. Example are Blaster Suite Online (blasteronline.com)

10)                  Get Others’ Opinions

Why is it so important to get others’ opinions?

A blog is a living thing just like other living beings. It starts young, it grows and get matured. In this course your will be monitoring this grow by improving your content every day. You can only improve your content if you have improved your blog content writing skills by visiting other blogs for personal review, and therefore, you will end up writing quality and professional posts.

There are three stages to get others’ opinions

• Visit other competitive blogs of your industry to learn how do they approach post writing and then…
• Getting the reviews from your partners, friends or closest family members who are familiar with your industry and then…
• At the end of your post ask questions or insert a simple survey form to get audience opinion. You can also and Rection buttons and or insert a multi platform social media comments button to make your post interactive and engaging.

Question or comment form should focus on what is missing in the post and that readers want to be added. You can also ask the readers what other topic they prefer to be posted parallel to the post on question.

11)                    Publicize Your Post to External Outlets

Make sure that you integrate your blog to auto blogging so that your post once completed are shared to other media including social media. This requires that your website contain automation tools

At the end of the post put a post sharing button to your preferred social media, print and send to email

12)                   Inspiring Author biography with contacts

The author biography will add many values to your article in these ways

1. The inspiring message will add trust and reliability to the article by your readers
2. The contacts will make it easy for your readers to ask questions or send recommendations directly to the author

Introduction to SEO

by admin | Jul 29, 2024 | Blog News - English, SEO

Introduction

This course is designed to cover non-technical areas in SEO where most marketers can fit in. IT is a course that will enable any marketer to become a popular blogger and online marketer. With this knowledge you can do many online businesses weather in normal websites, blog, directories, social media or any other online media.

To make it easy we use 3 pillars concept to deliver the required message to the audience

Our introductory part will constitute the following 3 pillars

1. Website Audit
2. SEO Concept
3. Google Ranking Concept

Website Audit

Definition

Website audit is an analysis done by a website marketer in order to know the current SEO status-quo of the website. Analysis trying to relate the website with current SEO practices in the respective industry. The main objective of this audit is to find issues that affecting organic ranking of the website which can be included in the next SEO Project planning and implementation.

The questions below touch the critical aspects of SEO requirements:

When answered correctly, these answers can help develop a Website SEO Audit Report

1. Does the website have a clear marketable brand or identity?
2. Is the website language, font type and size, color scheme and other visual look match the niche market and audience?
3. Is the website 99.9% uptime % per year?
4. Is the website mobile friendly?
5. Is the webpage fast in both mobile and desktop devices?
6. Is the website compatible with popular browsers?
7. Is the website calling protocol secured?
8. Is the website free of errors?
9. Is the website well hardened?

• Are the website content rich enough to satisfy the needs of the visitors?
• Is web content well-structured to offer a smooth logical flow to the readers?
• Is website content well optimized?
• Is a website navigation system well implemented to provide the visitors with smooth surfing and browsing experience?
• Are website meta tags (meta tags include the <title> and <description> elements) well implemented?
• Are website images well optimized and placed in the website with relevant alt text and sizes?
• Are website anchor-links well implemented?
• Are website functions and features well implemented?
• Is website Sitemap and Robots.txt well placed?
• Is the website code to text ration small (Recommended is between 25% to 70%)?
• Are website Open Graph Meta Tags correctly set?
• Is your website schema markup correctly set?
• Is the website linked with social media?

The SEO Audit Report is a must have documents before planning and doing and SEO project.  The exercise can be done using AI tools or do it manually

Reference for Site SEO Audit

Some of the tools here are free and others are premium tool, you must pay to use the tool.

1. SEO Checker | Test your website for free with Seobility
2. Website Optimization and Digital Agency Sales Tools | WooRank
3. Semrush – Online Marketing Can Be Easy
4. Analyze Websites With Free SEO Audit & Reporting Tool – SEOptimer
5. Free SEO Checker: Website SEO Analysis Tool & Audit Report (neilpatel.com)
6. SEO Site Audit tool by Ahrefs
7. SEO Tools, Software and Articles | SEO Site Checkup
8. Audit your website for SEO and performance – Geekflare Tools
9. Website SEO Checker & Audit Tool: Test Your Score for FREE ? (sitechecker.pro)
10. Website Audit Tool – Automated Site Audit ?? 120+ Checks (seranking.com)
11. Technical SEO Audit | Website Auditing Tool (serpstat.com)

Page speed tools

1. https://pagespeed.web.dev/ from Google
2. https://gtmetrix.com/
3. Website Speed Test | Pingdom Tools

Schema markup common categories

9 Most Common Schema Markup Types – Overdrive Interactive (ovrdrv.com)

Math rank plugin is the best plugin to help you your assign relevant schema to your webpage

SEO Concept

How SEO Works?

To explain how this works, let me dip inside Search Engine Optimization with reference to Google

Why Search Engines?

Almost 90% of people who search information via the internet uses search engines

Why Google?

Almost 80% of people who search information via search engines uses Google Search Engine

Domain name: The name must really represent corporate identity. Name must be short, easier to pronounce/remember and that represent your corporate brand name/identity to your customer base. This will make it easy for your visitors come back to your website without being lost.

Hosting: The webserver speed must enhance general webpage speed. The server must use a speedy internet connection, modern fast hardware and applications that work very fast. So, the server speed indicates how fast your host’s machine will process user requests and find the needed content as fast as possible. To test server speed just ping or tracert the nameserver or associated IP address from the command prompt. The fast server must be below 350-400ms and an average speed server up to 700-800ms. A slow server is above 700-800ms

Design: When visitors visit your website, they expect to found a well branded website which is fast and if they found otherwise, they will be angry and most of them will leave your website without doing any activity.

Google will also be angry and will allocate your website with a big Bounce rate which consequently lead to low ranking

Content: When a visitor visits your webpage, he/she expect also to find well arranged, structured and logically written quality content that satisfy his/her needs. If he/she find no quality content again he/she will become angry and leave without doing any activity in the page. We expect the same outcome from Google

Marketing: It will now make sense if everything with your website is OK to publicizes so that targeted people will know that website exists and offering service that they want. Use any means so that your website is exposed to as many people as possible. The best way is to use social media with many followers, likes and lots of people engagement

Google Ranking Concept

How Google Ranking Works?

Google uses its algorithm to rank collected keywords by its bots in relation to the webpage URL. The algorithm contains several criteria and signals that assign points to your keywords attached to your webpage URL. If your keyword and its URL receive enough points over the other keywords from competitors webpages then your webpage will be ranked higher in Google search results page.

If the points are the highest one, your keyword will be ranked no. 1

If your keyword assigned points is the second highest then it will be placed no. 2 in the results page and likewise to the other keywords. Point to note

Every ranked keyword goes with the following aspects

1. Webpage URL
2. Webpage Title
3. Webpage description

Elaboration from Google cited results page for the Keyword “Tanzania Budget Safari, 5 days”

How are these points allocated to the keywords?

I will not give the 100% answer because that one is not available, but I will provide a big picture of what actually happen in keyword ranking with Google

Of all thousand rules included in the Google algorithm, only one rule prevails

“Love your web visitors as you love yourself”

Google want web designer, developer, content creators and marketers to put the website in such a way people will love it and stay longer in the website.

The questions above under Website Audit will ensure that your visitor will love your website

How Google understand that your web visitors love your website?

Google can collect some signals via Googlebot’s, those signals are:

1. Bounce rate
2. Time spends in the page
3. Trusted by other trustworthy websites thru quality inbound links

Google never dare to bring visitors to the website which is not loved by other visitors, WHY? Because in order for a person to visit your website, he/she first become Google customer. Google care a lot its customers and they are not ready to let them down by taking them to the bad website

Bounce rate is defined as a number of visitors who visited your website and left immediately without engaging to any part of your website.

To understand better a bounce rate and its impact let check this table and the recommendations

Speed: When visitors visit your webpage, they expect to found a website which is fast and if they found otherwise, they will be angry and most of them will leave your website without doing any activity.

Google will also be angry and will allocate your website with a big Bounce rate which consequently lead to low ranking

Content: When a visitor visits your webpage, he/she expect also to find well arranged, structured and logically written quality content that satisfy his/her needs. If he/she find no quality content again he/she will become angry and leave without doing any activity in the page. We expect the same outcome from Google

Service: After surfing your fast webpage and finish reading your quality content, a visitor expects good quality service from your webpage. This service includes any support, quote application and or product or service booking function. If no service, the visitor won’t do any enough activity that will send good signals to Google.

If all above are implemented very well then Google will like your webpage and will rank your keywords from that webpage so that more visitors will come and benefit from your quality content.

Google is doing all these because Google believe that all visitors who visit your website become Google customers first and Google is not ready to let down their customers by sending them to bad webpages