Writing well-researched and optimized blog posts for users and search engines can be challenging. You need to be smart about choosing and writing your topics to keep your reader engaged, and pay attention to the small details and implement a set of SEO rules.

For improving your rankings, you need to both follow the SEO rules and improve your writing skills. In today’s read, let’s start with some basics about writing for SEO, breakdowns and find out how mind mapping helps during the process.

What is Writing for SEO?

Writing for SEO means that your content focuses on providing users with valuable information that answers their questions. Additionally, it means optimizing for keywords and key phrases that help search engines better understand your content.

Tips for Writing an SEO-friendly Post

1. Research on Your Topic

In SEO, writing great content is the key.

Before writing, think about what to write on your blog post and write down your thoughts on mind maps first. We recommend that you read several articles related to SEO and digital marketing daily.

Topic research is a great resource for SEO writing. If you find an interesting title or topic, copy the URL and title and save them in your notes. You can use a keyword search tool, for instance, SEMrash and Ahrefs. Where you will see data related to the topic volume, difficulty, and topic effectiveness. Titles and questions related to that specific keyword are also offered.

2. Identify the Target Audience for Your Blog

No matter what industry your blog is targeting, you want to identify and speak to the main audience that will read your content. Understanding who your audience is and what you want them to do when they’re reading your article will help guide your blogging strategy.

Buyer personas are an effective way to target readers using their buying behavior, demographics, and psychology. Without this review, you could create grammatically correct and accurate content that few people click on because it doesn't speak to them on a personal level.

3. Create the structure for your blog post

Start by creating a clear structure for your blog post. Dividing your SEO-friendly blog into three different parts makes writing easier. Each post should have:

Write down what you want to say in each of the three sections on a mind map, and you will receive a summary of your blog post. This makes a quick overview of what you’re trying to convey through a piece of writing. Instead of writing larger sections, you can write 200 words to cover a specific part of your blog post.

4. Determine Search Intent & Identify the Right Format

Search intent can be defined as what a user searches for.

Google pays close attention to teaching algorithms to properly evaluate users' intentions and encourages content creators, SEO writers, and webmasters to respond to queries with relevant material.

The content format you choose, the message you send, and the call to action should depend on the purpose of your keyword search. Search intentions can be divided into four different types, and each type has its own set of standard terms that you can associate with each one.

5. Decide on the Title & Meta Description

Creating a good and interesting title is an essential step for SEO purposes and user-friendliness.

Some bloggers prefer to take this step first and then create a blog structure, others prefer to come up with a headline if you have a good idea of what the blog post is about. Follow what is most effective for you.

Whatever you prefer, a good title should have a limit of 55-60 characters to display in the search engine result pages (SERPS) without breaks. It should include your target keyword (but no keywords). This should provide an accurate description of the content contained in the blog post.

It should be intriguing enough to get users to click when it appears on search engine results pages. A descriptive tag is a summary of a blog that is less than 200 characters long. It's important to optimize the length of your meta description, as Google may choose to display your description in the results. The description should be informative and engaging to encourage users to click on your link and visit your blog.

6. Use Paragraphs and Headings

Everybody is well aware of the uses of paragraphs, but not everyone uses them well.

Don’t start every new sentence on a new line just because it looks beautiful. Also, try not to make them too long, as each paragraph should have its idea or topic. Ask yourself what the basic idea of each section is. You should summarize this basic idea in one sentence. If this is not possible, and you need more sentences to explain the basic idea, you just need to use additional paragraphs.

Appropriate headings also help your readers understand what a specific part of your text is about. If you want people to have a clear understanding of your articles, use subheadings to guide them. Subtitles help readers scan your page, and explain the structure of your articles. These are crucial for smooth readability and SEO. That's why I'd suggest using your keyword in some subtitles. I target some of them because using a keyword in each title makes the text awkward and unnatural. It keeps people from reading.

7. Add Visuals & Link to Existing Content

Search engines like Google evaluate images for certain keywords. Images and videos are some of the most common visual elements that appear on a search results page. You can draw creative graphics, use original photos and videos, and add a descriptive title to each visual element of your blog post to get the place you want in your image package or video. Alt-text is the deciding feature that determines whether your image or video appears in the SERPs and how high it would be ranked. Alternative text is also important for screen readers so that visually impaired people have a positive experience consuming the content of your blog.

Add internal links every time you post a new blog post, but only when it makes sense. If you already have a blog post that you can associate with your new blog post, it's a good idea to use it.

Takeaway

Ask your friend/colleague to read it before publishing. Ask them if they understand the basic concept of your post, and ask them to correct any typographical or grammatical errors. It can help you by giving an objective view of the readability and attractiveness of your text. If there is someone on your team who is an expert on the topic you are writing about, skip the post. This allows them to check if you are reflecting on everything you need and make suggestions to improve the post.

Reference: https://learnseoservice.com/mind-map-a-great-seo-friendly-article/