This blog post on how to optimize a blog post of mine is meant for bloggers who runs a blog, and who has a bit of the knowledge of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). As you might be aware that SEO is a process to optimize your website for search engines, as per the keywords which are relevant to your website.

In a nut-shell you might summarize SEO as a process explained above.

But, do you think SEO is as simple as that one line?

Well, if you ask me then it is. SEO is quite simple; it is a process to develop your website following quality guidelines.

What quality guidelines?

You might ask me this.

Well, I am not going in deep about those quality guidelines in this blog post of mine, as you might read other blogs of mine which will explain you those things, rather in this post I am going to explain about the steps which might help you to optimize your blog post.

Ways to Optimize a Blog Post?

Here are a few steps which you might focus whenever you start creating a new blog post for your blog:

Choose Easy and Long Tail Keyword

Before planning the blog post, always choose an easy keyword for it. Let me give an idea about it, as I started writing this blog post, I thought about the term “optimize a blog post” as the main keyword. I know it will be hard for me to rank well on that, so I fixed a long tail keyword like “how to optimize a blog post” for this blog post of mine.

Do you think I can be able to rank well in search engines for this keyword?

I would be glad, in fact really great if most of you will say a yes to the above question. 🙂

Well, precisely if you already have a good knowledge of SEO, then you can really think about keywords, their popularity, competition, etc. and you can be able to judge the perfect keyword or phrases for your blog post, but if you are a newbie with SEO, then also you need not to worry about.

Whenever you plan a new blog post, think about the best possible keyword or phrases, for which a user will find your blog post as a true resource, or response. Thus, fix the same for your blog post. But here, you need to consider one thing quite importantly, you should not go with quite generic terms, as that will be highly competitive and the chances of ranking well for those keywords will be hard for you.

So to make the process easy we go with long tail keywords, as that will have less competition and have fair chance for your blog post to rank soon on that.

So do you think that choosing an easy or long tail keyword is all enough to rank your blog post?

Frankly speaking, no, only choosing or finding a proper keyword is not enough.

Then what else do I need to optimize my blog post?

Keyword Placing

As I mentioned in my above point that only choosing a keyword is not enough, to optimize the blog post properly we will have to place them in prominent places.

Which places are there in which I will have to put the keywords to rank better?

Well, you might be thinking the same. No need to worry about, I am here to help you out.

Title

There are a few places which are quite prominent for your primary keywords in your blog post. The title of the blog is one of the most important aspects where you must need to put your keyword.

Like as you see, I made the same keyword as the title of this blog post.

URL

URL or permalink of the blog post is the second most prominent place to put your keyword, so that it can help you to rank well in future.

First Paragraph

Other than title and permalink, it is quite good if you can be able to put your keyword in the first paragraph of your blog post, like I did in this post of mine.

Although if you think that it is not coming naturally in your first paragraph, then you can easily ignore it as well. Like you might see that some of my blog posts start with a general line, or question, which don’t include the keywords. You might place the keyword in any prominent paragraph, coming as soon as possible from the top.

Alt tag

Alternative tags or the alt tags is one of the most ignored field of blogs, many people do this mistake of not providing alt tags for their images. To rank well, you must need to make a practice of giving alt tags to each and every images of your blog post.

I will explain about the same below too. So don’t worry about what it is and how to give it?

Article Body

Try to put your keyword in between the content for at least 2-3 times. Try to put them at the middle of the post and at the last paragraph as well. But, don’t make the over use of the same.

Meta Tags

As you might be aware that Google does not gives much value to the Meta tags, but still I would suggest you all to give Meta Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords as well, and obviously putting your main keywords over there is a must.

So, you came up with Keyword and placed them too prominently, are they enough to rank your blog post?

No, they are not. So what more things do I need to do?

Here are a few:

Header Tags

Proper use of the header tags in your blog post is really crucial. There should be at least a H1 or H2 tags which might be your main keyword, or another keyword which will be quite relevant to the main keyword only.

As you will find that in this post I choose how to optimize a blog post as my main keyword, which I placed prominently on Title, Meta Tags, Alt Tags, first paragraph, article body, etc. but then I made H1 tags for ways to optimize a blog post. Hope this example is self explanatory for you.

Also include a few key terms as H3 or H4 tags.

Optimize Images

As mentioned above that Alt tags are important, you might have thought about why?

Why alt tags are so important?

Well, to be very precise, Google, or any search engine, would not be able to read the images of your website or blog, so to let them know we must need to use this alt tags or alternative tags through which they will understand what exactly this image is represent.

Not only this, a proper alt tag will boost the chances of ranking that particular image in the image search section of Google, or any other search engines. Thus we cannot ignore this fact.

Tags or Labels

Now this tag is entirely different than what we said about Meta tags and Alt tags. To be very precise, those who blog either on WordPress or in Blogger are must be familiar with this term tags (used in WordPress platform) or labels (used in Blogger platform).

These are known as a set of secondary keywords, through which this particular article will be tagged to your blog. Let’s say, I give a tag of “optimize a blog post” for this blog in my site, then whenever you will search for this term in my site, this blog post of mine will be displayed in search results.

Though there are many bloggers who don’t give much importance to this field, they use to display only one or maximum two-three tags with their blog post. On the other hand my take on these are different. I use to give as many tags as possible, though strictly authentic one only.

You might ask me why?

See, there are two things which prompt me to give them in majority, one it will be searched easily then on your own website, second tags pages are also considered by search engines for ranking purpose, so when someone searches for a keyword or phrases in any search engine, there are chances that our tag page will be displayed over there. When user landed to our tag page, he or she might be able to see more than one blog listed over there, and they might click on any one blog, this way it can reduce the bounce rate of our blog too.

So, this is the reason why I personally give importance to the tags. Do let me know your intake about it.

Internal Linking

Internal linking also plays a very crucial role behind the ranking of your website in search engines. If you are blogging from a long time, I am pretty sure you must have written so many blogs, either in one domain only or in multiple domains also.

So my point is that, whenever you write a new blog try to link them with similar or relevant content written by you only in past. This way you are actually insisting your reader to read more from your own blog, thus decreasing the bounce rate and increasing the user stay and user satisfaction, which are really considered by Google and other search engines as a criteria to rank a particular blog post.

You might also use the plugins like related posts, which can include some related posts into any blog post.

Thus I am quite sure you are now aware about internal linking playing crucial role in the ranking of a particular blog post. But, please mind the number of posts which you are linking in a blog post. It should not exceed than ten links, otherwise it will look like a spam only.

Word Count

Did you notice that word count also matters in the ranking of a web site, or page or blog?

Let me tell you an interesting point. Commonly if you analyze the top 5 links in Google search, you will found that maximum of them are having more than 2000 words content.

So is there any secret of writing 2000+ words content and rank them well in Google?

Well, not exactly. It is not like that you decided to write a new blog post, and tried implemented many things into it, just to make it a 2000+ words post, then it is wrong.

Well, if you ask me, try to write whatever is possible to include in it. The message is quite sure that you should not leave some very important information while creating a new blog post, and not even include unnecessary things into it.

Ideally, if you ask me a blog post of around 1000+ words is good enough. Also if you including more graphics than words, it will help you to rank a 500 words article as well.

So the key is to write a killer blog post. Don’t know how to write a killer blog post?

Do read my blog post on it: how to write killer blog post?

Social Sharing

And the last but not the least element which helps us to optimize a blog post is the social sharing option. These options are a must these days, if you really want to rank your blog post.

Search engines these days giving much value to the social signals and these sharing options help your blog post in doing so.

Not only this, you also need to consider about sharing your blog post in social sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, etc. These sites are something which can provide you some huge amount of relevant traffic and engagement as well.

I don’t know if I am a good blogger or not, it is you who only decide the same. So please do let me know if you consider me a good blogger?

Whatever you think about me, or about this blog post, please don’t hesitate in sharing the same with us. After all I would love to hear about if I can be able to help you out with how to optimize a blog post or not.