Tag: SEO

Writing a blog post or an article which is engaging and gets people’s attention is a tiring task. Along with writing a good content you also have to make sure that your blog post is SEO friendly. SEO score plays an important role in making your blog popular.

SEO is search engine optimization and it helps your blog or website to be easily findable on the internet. Having a good SEO score means that your blog post may get recommended by google whenever someone will make a search on the topic related to your post. You definitely need good number of pageviews in order to have your blog or website shown on the first page of search engine but SEO friendly posts will definitely help you progress faster.

In order to write a SEO friendly post you have to make sure all the requirements are met which are set by the hosting platforms. I use the wordpress hosting, so I’ll tell you how you can write a SEO friendly post on wordpress. In wordpress above 80 is considered as good SEO score but I’d say you should strike for more than 90. If you are also using wordpress for writing your blog then you must have seen the page analysis which is given at the bottom of the page where you write your post. It has 3 main things to determine the SEO score, which are

• Basic SEO
• Title
• Readability

On the basis of these 3 attributes your SEO score, which is shown on the right top corner of the page, is measured. There are various things which affect these 3 attributes. You can see what affects your SEO score by just clicking on them on the bottom of your page. Let us discuss them one by one.

Basic SEO

Your basic SEO mainly has four things which effect it. These four things are

• Meta description length – Meta description is basically how your post will look on google’s search engine page. It will have the title of your post and under that some preview of the content of your post. Your meta description should not be more than 160 characters and not less than 120 characters. There is a meta description box above the page analysis where you can write your meta description and above that is snippet preview where you can see how your post will look on google’s page.
• Content length – It is basically the length or words required for your post. Minimum words required for a post are 300. I’d suggest you to write at least 500 words for your blog post.
• Internal links – If you have written other posts, you can add their link to your new post. It will help your SEO score and possible more views for your old posts.
• External links – You can add link of the blog of someone else if you want your readers to read that because you find it useful or if you have used someone else’s image/video then add a link to the original. You can also add affiliate links if you want .

These are four main things which effect the basic SEO. Apart from the another thing which effects it is the focus key-phrase. I’ll talk about it in the end of this post.

Read also: 6 most effective ways to write a better blog

Title

As the name suggests, title is basically the title of your post and it should not be more than 60 characters. Focus key-phrase also play some role in your title and I’ll tell you about that in the end.

There is another things which may not effect your SEO score directly but it effects the likability of your post. It is your headline score or title score. There is a headline analyzer on the right top corner of the page next to the SEO score, it shows you your headline score. If you’ll click on that, you can see the things which can help you increase the headline score such as common words, uncommon words, power words and sentiment of title. Good headline score is between 60 to 100 but always try to get more than 70.

Read also: 5 big reasons to start a blog

Readability

Readability as the name suggests helps you make your post easily readable for the viewers. The things which effects readability are as follows

• Image or video – Its advisable to use image, gif or video to convey your idea effectively. It helps you score better in your SEO but only use images/videos which are free to use for personal and commercial purposes.
• Paragraph length – The length of your paragraph should not be more than 10 lines which comes around 170-200 words. Longer paragraphs will show you error in paragraph length section.
• Sentence length – The length of the sentences should not be more than 20 words. About 25% sentences are allowed to be more than 20 words but not more than that.
• Passive voice – Always try to write your sentences in active voice. Only 10% of the total sentences can be in passive voice.
• Transition words – Do use transition words in your sentences such as and, but, therefore, hence and more. Whenever you are writing a sentence which is more than 20 words, try to add transition word in it.
• Consecutive sentences – If you are using the word ‘The’ as the first word of your sentence consecutively then it can show you error. Try to mix up your sentences, use different words to start sentences.
• Subheading distribution – The number of words in any heading of your post should not exceed 300 word limit. It is advisable to sub-headings if you are writing a long post.
• Flesch reading ease – It only gives error when your post is difficult to read which can be due to the font of your writing or there are too complicated sentences or too much errors in your spellings.

These are the things which effect the SEO score. These things are not very hard to maintain.

What is focus key-phrase and it effects SEO

You will find the focus key-phrase box between the meta description box and page analysis. Focus key-phrase is basically the word or phrase which you can add in focus key-phrase box and whenever someone will search that word or phrase, there are high chances that your blog or post will get recommended to that person.

It is not mandatory to use focus key-phrase. If you use it then it effects your SEO score in different ways and it should be present in

• the title of your post
• the first paragraph of your post
• the meta description
• the URL of your post
• headings and sub-headings
• the image alt attribute if you are using an image
• it should also be in the front or middle of your title not in the last

When you use focus key-phrase, do take care of these things. It is advisable to use focus key-phrase as it helps in increasing the visibility of your post.

These are the things which effects your overall SEO score. If you will do all these things right then surely you will get 100 SEO score but sometimes you can’t put focus key-phrase in every heading or you can’t control the number of words under one heading. Sometimes there are no external links to add and if its your first post then there are no internal links to add. There can always be one or two errors in your SEO analysis and that’s totally fine. If you can get 100 the its great but even if you don’t then just try to score more than 90, you will be fine.

Hope this post was helpful to you and do share it with your friends and family, greatly appreciate your support.

Read also: Blogging: 8 important things to know before you start