Blog Content: How to Make Search Engines and Your Readers Love You

When writers hear they need to optimize their blog content to be found in the search engines, they shudder. The thought of writing blog content for the search engines doesn’t fit their writing style.

Don’t fret – it’s not that hard!

The tips below should get you on the right track to making everyone happy and below is the suggested order for you when you are developing blog content:

  1. Write for your readers
  2. Write for yourself
  3. Write for the search engines
  4. Write for your bank account {if monetization is one of your goals for your blog}

After you have your well crafted DRAFT article, now you will optimize it to attract the search engines.

Are you ready? Let’s do this!

Blog Content

First, let’s look at the tools I recommend that you should use {my favorite SEO plugins}. If you need help using these plugins, let us  know.

  • WordPress SEO by Yoast
  • SEOPressor

And now the juicy, meaty details of how to optimize for SEO.

Target Keywords in Your Post’s Title: Your prime real estate in your title is to the far left. I crack up with I see coupon bloggers write their titles this way “HOT HOT HOT – Print Now High-Value Coupon for Friskies Cat Food.”

WHOA! Do you see all those characters to the left? Most search engines read an average of 70 characters and when your keywords are placed where the search engines will find them, you are missing some drops of Google juice. Try to keep your length under 70 characters {ignore my title of this article – LOL}.

When Google {and other search engines} read your blog to index it, the title of your article is one of the first items the search engines will “see.”

Content length: You will hear over and over and over that content is king. Well written and optimized text is what the search engines love so give it to them! Now… don’t write a book but try to write at least 300 – 500 words per post.

The longer your article is, the longer they will stay on your website {which is good for your stats).

Link building: Let’s say you are writing an article on the world’s most perfect apple pie. Once your reader has finished your post, now what?! Give them something else to read – show them the signs – point them to where you want them!

Each time you tell your readers where to go you are gaining more page views, which is important for your site when brands start to ask for your stats.

Think of the content on your site as the crumbs of Hansel and Gretel’s trail {I love analogies and these cute little funky parenthesis thingies.} The more crumbs you give them, the deeper into the woods… I mean your site they will go.  And guess what, the search engines love this too. Internal linking is a win-win and every article should have at least one internal link from your post to another one on your site.

Word of caution – LEARN HOW TO PROPERLY LINK! Look at the example below and the differences between the two examples. When you bold and hyperlink the words CLICK HERE, you are telling the search engines that those are your keywords. Is that what you want?

When you create your internal links within your blog content, be sure to BOLD and UNDERLINE your keywords that lead to another page. BOLD tells the search engines that the words are important to the article. UNDERLINE is one of my pet peeves – if your visitor is color blind, they may not be able to differentiate colors on your site to know where the link it.

About the Author: Carol James is an EssayLab psychology department writer and senior editor. She has MA degree in social sciences and is an excellent specialist in this field. Carol worked with numerous materials on the subject and is eager to share her knowledge with our readers.