Do you have a basic guide to blog SEO and checklist for me to get started?
If you’re still wondering where exactly you should proceed with optimizing your blog posts, I can give you some useful recommendations and a brief SEO checklist for you to know the right points of focus. Of course, if you want to take the maximum marketing advantage with your blog pages and successfully address to a really wide audience you’re targeting with your content. So, here is your basic on-page SEO checklist to get started with your blog’s optimization and make it noticed in the relevant online search.
Introduction to SEO: Checklist for Blog Content Optimization
All About Main Target Keywords
Start with handling in-depth keyword research. Of course, the chances are that you’re gifted writer by nature and really know the subject you’re involved, or at least can naturally include all the necessary search terms in your body content – and it will be still flawlessly perfect for all (i.e., being technically sound, relevant and keyword-rich for the major search engines like Google itself, and feature natural wording making sense for the live readers too). But the thing is that there might as well be a lot of other equally or even more valuable keywords you have been missing so far. I mean not only regarding relevance, as usually there are many various “hidden” keyword combinations (otherwise, long-tail search terms), which can be “uncovered” only when suggested with the right keyword research tool.
That’s why I recommend using at least the basic option available with Google’s AdWords (or Keyword Planner Tool) available in open access by default. But I personally recommend choosing something more advanced to track your main web metrics too. Among the other use-proven analytical toolkits and all-round online platforms, you can try Moz’s Open Site Explorer, Semalt’s Website Analyzer (by Semalt), or Screaming Frog SEO Spider.
Basics of On-Page SEO
Once you have created your general list of related search terms to optimize for, and successfully refined it to keep only top relevant keywords and must-winning long-tail phrases, it’s time to use them throughout every post. Doing so, remember that you’re still optimizing for human-friendly reading, not just for the sake of machine indexing. At the same time, however, make sure to make your content structure technically sound through the following elements:
- Page Titles and H1/H2 Headings – are arguably the most important places that need to be fully clean & concise, in line with bearing your best keyword assets. Try to locate your top relevant search terms closer to the title/header beginning – and you’re done.
- Introductory Sentence/Concluding Paragraph – are also critical for SEO, due to their critical impact on your way of look in Google’s SERPs. I mean that these shreds of content will have good chances of being displayed right inside the Rich Snippet, which should be as welcoming and compelling as possible.
- Metadata – make sure to fill in your Title Tags, in line with creating the right shreds of text content, which make the rest of your metadata, such as Meta Descriptions and Image ALT Tags.
- Custom URL – reworking your default URLs originally made up at random into something that makes sense will definitely improve your overall user experience (due to easier shareability, copy/paste actions, and the minimum rate of misspelling). What’s more – Google search itself loves custom URL structure created with unique URLs, each related to its relevant topic category or blog section. So, you should rework your URLs anyway – at least because it’s a good opportunity to drop several keywords or related phrases over there.
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