by Lisa Wozniak

SEO

Have you ever been intimidated about writing a blog post that has intentional SEO content? That was something that used to keep me up at night for sure. We all want to have the strong search engine optimization that will take us to the top of Google’s coveted rankings, don’t we? But how do you know which keywords? How do we know if they work? How do we use them in the content of the blog post? Should it only be in the title? How do you select a title that will be enticing enough to capture your readers?

What I found by time and research was that this task probably isn’t as daunting as you think. With some careful planning and research, you can utilize some free tools to help you accomplish your goal of creating SEO blog posts that get noticed and improve your engagement ratings.

Brainstorm Keywords

After you’ve chosen the topic of your blog post. You’ll want to brainstorm keywords. This is a step that many omit and end up trying to fit the proverbial square peg in a round hole. This task should be a random free flowing of ideas. Try to come up with approximately 30 keywords if you can. Certainly the more the better.

A great tool in this process can be Ubersuggest.org. This is a free tool that allows you to type in a keyword or topic and receive hundreds of related keyword suggestions. You then can click on a word that appeals to you and received more suggestions that use that word as its base. For example, if you type in “SEO Blog” you will see a list of several hundred suggestions. If the words “SEO Blog Tips” appeals to you, then by clicking on it you will receive several suggestions that use the words “SEO Blog Tips” as its base.

Research strength of Keywords

Now that you have compiled a list of keywords, you’ll want to test the strength of those keywords and make a decision on those that you’d like to use. To accomplish this you can utilize Google Adwords or Moz. For the purposes of this article you we’ll discuss the popular Google Adwords Keyword Planner. This tool is free to use but requires registering on the site.

Begin by selecting the option to search for new keyword and ad group ideas. In the next screen you will have the ability to plug in the keywords combination you’re interested in from the list of keywords that you’ve compiled. In this case “SEO Blog Tips”.

Adwords Graph Pic

This is going to provide you with both graph and statistical data to help you make your decision. If you are a very successful and popular blogger you may choose to look at words that have a high monthly search count and competition. If you are not an established blogger, you’ll want to steer of those kind of numbers for a bit and perhaps focus on words that have as high an average monthly search number as possible while not being overly competitive.

 

Plug into Content

Congratulations! At this point you have selected some powerful keywords that will get you noticed and maintain a competitive edge for you. Now you’ll want to find as many opportunities to plug them into your content as possible without sacrificing the quality of your article. Make certain that you don’t mess with the ebb and flow of your content in this process. You can’t sacrifice quality for quantity here. Create an article that is not only easy to read, but easy to skim as well. Just like in advertising, when your blog first appears in front of your readers’ eyes, you have a very limited time to capture their attention before they make the decision to continue reading or move on to the next best thing. You can insert picture or videos to break up the article or simply choose subtitles and adjust the font to make them stand out. You’ll want to make sure that these sub-titles are directive and eye catching to continue to engage your readers.

Title your Masterpiece

Have you ever thought about the articles that captured your attention? They’re usually articles that have some kind of a hook that draws you in and urges you to read more, don’t they? This is called Emotional Marketing Value or EMV. There are certain words that trigger an emotional response for us. The good news is there are tools to help us tap into that and determine a title that will allow us to see which words in our title will trigger that response. The English language contains around 20% of EMV words. And while we’d all like to produce a title that will encompass 100% Emotional Market Value, even the most gifted writers will yield a score of 50-75%. So, your average rule of thumb here should be a title that will generally yield a score between 30-40%. The good news is that there are tools that can help you accomplish this. By plugging in your blog’s title into aminstitute.com you can plug in a sample title and get an Emotional Marketing Value score. You can even choose options for what kind of titles you’d like to utilize. Examples of this would be a selection of fun titles to shocking titles. Remember, however, that as a business owner, you want to present yourself as an expert in your field; so going too dramatic could make you look like the National Inquirer of your industry.

That said, enjoy this process. It’s not as difficult as you think to market yourself through SEO blog posts to engage your audience online and reap the coveted Google ranking you desire.

I really hope that this helps give you a guide to building an SEO blog post.

2 Comments

  1. I was curious if you ever considered changing the page layout
    of your blog? Its very well written; I love what youve got to say.
    But maybe you could a little more in the way of content so
    people could connect with it better. Youve got an awful lot of text
    for only having 1 or two images. Maybe you could space it out better?

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