How to Write On-Page SEO Blog Posts: Advanced Tips + Infographic
There’s a lot of noise about what SEO writing is.
So let me break it to you: writing an SEO-friendly blog post isn’t about finding the perfect and unique set of keywords. Throwing them on a blank page, creating content around it, and calling it a day.
No, it also isn’t just about H1s and H2s.
What is SEO writing then?
SEO writing is about writing for both people and search engines with the goal of communicating information effectively. And as a means of bringing more traffic to your website and ranking higher in the search results. Usually with the help of on-page SEO.
In this post, we’ll go through what makes an SEO friendly blog post for both humans and search engines, in an on-page SEO approach. This blog post also includes a free and easy on-page SEO infographic for beginners or more advanced SEO writers.
But before we get there, let’s start with definitions
What Is On-Page SEO?
On page SEO is when you optimize the elements of a website page that are visible to the user (content, metadata, keywords, images, etc) to better their experience. It’s called on-page SEO because visitors are able to interact with and see these elements at the front end of a website.
You use on-page SEO to make your web pages relevant to search engines (like Google). So you can bring more traffic to your website as well as rank higher for your set of keywords. You could say that on-page SEO makes your content more digestible for both search engines and visitors.
With that clear, let’s get into detail.
9 On-Page SEO Blog Writing Tips [+Infographic]
I compiled an on-page SEO factors list that you should pay attention to if you want to write SEO-friendly blog posts, rank higher, and bring more traffic to your site. But also, an infographic for you to save and use whenever you’re SEO writing.
You can skip to the end to get your free on-page SEO infographic.
Or…
You can keep reading and have everything completely clear at the end of this post along with the infographic.
1. Use Your Target Keyword
This is the part most people obsess about. There are a lot of ways you can do keyword research and all options can be as effective or ineffective. It depends on how well you optimize the use of these keywords. So, here’s some advice:
Use the primary keyword you’re targeting in the first 100 words of your blog post: If the keyword you’re targeting appears early on in your post, this gives Google a clue about the topic. If you throw the keyword in the middle of it instead of the beginning, it doesn’t make much sense that’s your target keyword.
Use your keyword once or twice (or more): A lot of experts say that once or twice is enough, I differ. It’s true that once or twice is enough in some cases, but if you’re writing a blog post of 3,000 words about “digital marketing” and you just mention the keyword twice, it seems pretty hard to find out the blog post is about digital marketing.
The best approach is to not stress about how many times you use the keyword, but to make sure you’re writing naturally. You can include the keyword as many times as you want as long as it sounds natural. From experience, I can tell you won’t use the keyword just once or twice. Which gets us to…
Avoid keyword stuffing: Just as it sounds, avoid using the same keyword repeatedly.
“But you just said I could use my target keyword as much as I want”
Yes, as much as you want to use it, but as long as it sounds natural and not forced. Keyword stuffing was an old SEO technique in which people would stuff their keyword on a page in places where it didn’t even make sense.
AVOID THAT!!!
2. Optimize Your Metadata
Metadata is the information that appears on the SERP (search engine results page) to give you an idea of what the page you’re going to click on is about. The metadata elements are meta title, meta description, and URL.
If you still don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s a little reminder of what is metadata and where have you seen it:
And if you give it a closer look…
Optimized metadata helps users have a better idea of what the webpage they’re going to click on is about. And it can help your on-page SEO as well as your engagement. Here’s my advice for this:
Your meta title should have a length of between 55 and 60 characters: If it’s lower than that, you’re not using the available space to put a catchy meta title and you’re wasting the opportunity to include target keywords. Yes, include keywords on your meta title.
If your meta title is longer than 60 characters, it’ll be cut off like in the example below.
That doesn’t help user experience as it’s unsatisfying to people scrolling. They don’t get to see what all the title is about. To avoid this, you can use the free title tag preview tool from Moz. This tool shows you how your meta title appears on the search results of Google. So, use it!
Your meta description should have a length of between 155 and 160 characters: There’s something you should know about the meta description. Putting keywords on it doesn’t directly impact SEO. Google usually replaces your meta description with some other section of your post, as it sees fit, to satisfy users' intent.
The fact that you're using keywords in it and optimizing its length is just for the chance of Google choosing your meta description. That way you can attract clicks if you write an interesting and engaging meta description of what visitors are about to read.
3. Optimize Your URL
Your URL is also considered metadata, but I wanted to talk about it in a different light. So, let’s go with the basics and then some tricks for you to make your URL more effective.
An URL is made up of the domain, sub-domains, and URL slug.
Your URL slug should have a maximum of five words and again have your target keywords somewhere on those five words. Nothing too complicated.
But here’s where you learn something not many experts know.
It's also important that there are just two sub-domains between your domain and the URL slug. This is because of a website architecture principle. It’s a bad practice that a visitor has to do more than three clicks to reach a page.
This bad practice tells Google the page your URL slug represents isn’t as important. After all, is very far from the domain. Your page becomes relevant to search engines by being no more than three clicks away from the domain.
4. Use Headings (H1, H2s, and… H3s)
Headings are a must in SEO blog writing. Aside from making your post look organized, it helps Google understand what’s the topic and how it unfolds. To write an SEO friendly blog post you should:
Include your targeted keywords on the H1 and H2s: According to Clicta Digital keywords that you use in your H1 are the most important. And keywords that you use in your H2s are less important than your H1s, but still have an impact
You should use one H1 per web page: The H1 of a page is like the title/name of a book. There’s just one. Of course, you could still include another H1 on your blog post, but that would confuse search engines as to what’s the main topic
Don’t go lower than H3: Using H4s looks just… messy. You’ll make your visitors feel like they’re going down the rabbit hole of the internet or the topic you’re explaining. H3s is deep enough
Also, as a pro tip, if you format your blog post correctly for a query, it could be optimized for search intent and appear on a featured snippet like the example below.
So yes, formatting is super important. The usual unfolding of SEO friendly blog posts goes like this:
H1 Main topic
H2 Section break
H3 Subtopic
H3 Subtopic
H3 Subtopic
H2 Another section break
H2 Conclusion
If you’re a beginner in on-page SEO, you can study some of your favorite blog posts and see their structure.
5. Beware of Thin Content
Thin content is content that adds no value to the user or it’s low quality. And what I mean with low-quality content is when this is:
Automatically generated content from machines
Higher rate of advertisements over content for visitors
Low content, meaning less than 300 words on a page
Or duplicate content
If you want to write SEO friendly blog posts, remember that it’s all about the visitor’s experience. And if you have already experienced finding these types of thin content yourself, you know how frustrating it can be.
6. Use Internal Links
Most people don’t know the power internal links have, so they keep posting content without them. The thing is internal links are just as important as external links. Sure, external links bring traffic to your website from the corners of the internet. But how is this traffic going to flow on your website?
Visitors will get to the page they wanted to read about, finish and then leave. You don’t want that. You want to keep them engaged and make them click on another post that has a related topic. SO, you include an internal link.
There’s this thing called link juice that you have to let flow through your site. External links bring that link juice from other pages to your website and internal links help distribute it. Which helps Google know what posts are more relevant to your website.
If there are a lot of internal links pointing to one of your pages, that page must be important, right?
With the right internal linking strategy, you can better the SEO of your site. But you have to consider the use of anchor text. Anchor text is the underlined highlighted words that indicate an internal link.
Now, here are some tips for anchor text and to ensure the friendliness of your blog post:
Don’t use general words like “click here”, “read more here”, “here”, etc
Don’t put the raw URL link as anchor text
Don’t remove the underlined highlighted customization of the anchor text. Users won’t know if that’s an internal link because it looks like plain text, so they won’t click on it and there won’t be link juice flowing
Don’t use a whole phrase as anchor text. Try to anchor five words, so it doesn’t look crowded
Use keywords related to the post you’re linking back to
Internal links are powerful, so try to include a minimum of two in every SEO friendly blog post you write.
7. Optimize Your Images
Search engines like Google crawl your website and analyze all the information in it to understand it and index it in the best way possible. But what happens when crawlers find an image?
Well, they can’t recognize it as any other human could. And the fact that you like high-resolution images doesn’t mean Google likes them as well. They have to be optimized. Here’s how you to do it:
Keep the file size of your image below 70 kb: The image sizing and optimization can affect the speed of your website and its health. If your website takes too long to load, it negatively affects your SEO. In the case of larger files, you can go as big as 100 kb
Name your images: When users look at your images, they understand what are they about, but Google doesn’t. So, Google crawlers rely on the description of the image (or alt text) to know what is it about.
Here are some tips on how to name your images:
DO
Describe the image in five words or less. And make sure the description is related to what the image shows. You can even include some of your target keywords.
✅”best office laptops”
✅”laptops for IT representatives”
✅”laptops with 8Gb ram memory”
DON’T
❌”Screenshot_20220302-32410”
❌”laptop(2)”
❌”cheap+laptop+affordable+pcs+IT+representatives+office+best+laptops”
These names don’t describe your image to Google and the last one is considered keyword stuffing. So, be careful.
As ridiculous as it sounds, even though you just want to write an SEO friendly blog post. The SEO part means now you have to take care of images too.
8. Optimize for Featured Snippets
A featured snippet is that piece of text that appears at the top of the search results on Google (right below the ads, of course). Some call that the position zero. And it has the goal of showing users the information they’re looking for in the fastest and more effective way.
There are three steps to optimize for featured snippets:
Make sure there’s a featured snippet spot free: You can use tools like SEMrush to find what keywords have featured snippets and which ones are missing one. Or you can directly type on Google
Use tip #4 on this list, headlines: You have to use a headline with the query your audience wants solved. It’s usually an H2
The paragraph below the headline has to immediately answer the query: Here you give the critical information first. Remember, featured snippets are for your audience to get what they need in the most simple and understandable way
“But if my audience reads what they need on the featured snippet, I won’t get any visits. So, why optimize for a featured snippet?”
Optimizing for featured snippets is worth it. Your audience may read what they need, but if they want to understand the topic better, there’s nothing stopping them from clicking in to get more info.
What’s more, even if you don’t rank #1 for your targeted keyword, featured snippets can help you pull some traffic to your website. After all, featured snippets aren’t only extracted from the #1 result.
According to a study made by Supermetrics, almost 60% of featured snippets are pulled from the search results positions between #2 and #5. The fact that your page has a featured snippet makes your website the option most people would go to for more information.
9. Have Strong Readability Scores
Even if the blog post you wrote has a lot of helpful information with a completely new approach and all the SEO writing tips I gave you. That won’t be enough to rank if your readers have to re-read it over and over again to understand it.
That’s why having strong readability levels is important. Here’s my advice:
Use a lot of periods throughout your content, it’ll make your sentences shorter and understandable
Make your paragraphs short. A good rule of thumb is to have paragraphs between 3 and 4 lines. Humans read in sections and when a section is too long, it just becomes difficult to digest
Don’t use difficult terms to sound smart. Simplicity is better
How to make an SEO blog friendly is also about making it understandable for a wide audience. So, if you follow these tips, your readers will have a better time reading and retaining information.
You can check your readability scores by using the Hemingway App. Your aim is to have a readability score of 9 or lower. The lower the score, the more readable your blog post is. By the way, the post you’re reading right now has a readability score of 5.
On-Page SEO Infographic for Blog Posts
Now that we covered all the on-page elements that help you write an SEO-friendly blog post, here’s the infographic:
You can use it as an on-page SEO guide or checklist!
Download your free on-page SEO infographic.
It’s All About the User’s Experience, Right?
As you’ve already noticed, all the tips in this guide aren’t hard to follow. It’s all about presenting information in the best way possible and with the goal of helping someone solve a query
All these tips look like a lot at the beginning. But I assure you memorizing them won’t be a problem if you understand the why of each and every one of them. Which is why I explained it for you in every section.
I hope you found this SEO writing guide + the infographic helpful.
If you have questions or observations, drop them below!