5 SEO must dos for all your blog posts

By Casey Barnett
When you are creating a new article for your website, keep your search engine optimization awareness on high alert. There are lots of opportunities for you to write valuable SEO rich content with each of your articles, without having to compromise your article's content.

Make SEO Rich content with every post.

Here is a simple list for you to use when creating your next post.
Content Creation Illustration

Create Content that is digestible, relatable, and in the common language of your target site visitors

When you are writing keep in mind the intended reader of the article. Are they the general population who mostly read at an 8th-grade level or are they doctors or scientists expecting more precise language? Are they specialists, where you can use acronyms at a high volume or are then beginners into your world who need some explaining along the way? Knowing the target personas and archetypes of your content will allow you not only to write more easily but will help the correct target for your content to find your article through search engines as they use their language and expectations within their queries.

Evergreen content

When you writing your article, keep in mind, you want the content to be valuable today, tomorrow, and a year from now. Evergreen, meaning forever fresh, means that you are writing content that feels fresh no matter the time someone discovers it and reads it.

Sometimes you have to add content that may get dated. That is fine. You have my permission to go back and change those pieces of content in the future to keep them relevant. Have a state from 2018 that now has a new stat from 2021? Go change it!  Your articles are not written in stone tablets, or published in books (well most of you anyway). If the content you are creating can be updated, you should update it! I did! See those dates above, I changed those and you trust it more now than if it said 2015 to 2018.

Open External Links in a New Tab

Open Window in New TabReferring to other websites by linking to them is a great way to show your content is legit, well researched, and even possibly peer-reviewed. These links to external sites (anything not on your .com) provide your users with resources and can increase your reputation with them for being transparent and doing your research.

Make sure you set those links up to "open link in a new tab". It is usually just two or three extra clicks, to make this happen. This ensures that when people click on those links they do not travel away from your site and that your site stays open in another tab, making it easy for them to come back to your content.

Understanding H1s and other headings

For each of your posts, your post title should be an H1, and should be your only H1 on the page. For the content of your article, start with H2 and H3s as needed within your hierarchy. This will keep Google understanding what is important within your content, and not confuse titles with content. H1 and H2 should be quick hits, Headlines, and not long sentences. If you find yourself making an H1/H2 a sentence, it likely is not a headline. Either tighten them up or save those for H3/H4s.

Internal linking

Remember, the goal of your blog, for your business, is to move people into your sales funnel, not just to get them to your article. Once someone has reached your site, you want to move them to more valuable areas of your site without them needing to leave. This is where internal linking is valuable.

Find natural opportunities within your content to link to other content on your website. These links should go to other pages and posts within your site, and depending on the size of your site and the amount of content in your post, you should link to as many places as possible, without being obnoxious. I generally recommend 3-5 links per article when you are getting started. These links should be text links, AKA anchor text, not URLs. The Anchor text you choose for your link should provide context for what can be found on the destination page. Avoid anchor text that says: Read Me, Click for more, Here. These words provide no context to what will be found at that link.

From an SEO perspective, think about what information you are sending to the Search Crawler. The text in your anchor link tells the crawler your keywords for the destination page. This is a handy time to look over your keyword research list and keep those in mind for your other pages, not just this one.

Bonus tip: Copy the page URL from your browser, or use internal searching to put in your links. This ensures you have the right formatting of the URL for the links and you will avoid unnecessary 301 redirects from unsecured links or links missing trailing slashes.

Update past articles to link to your new article

So now you linked your new article to other articles on your site, can you link those articles back to your new one? Your goal, remember, is to build evergreen content. As we create and learn more and have more content to refer to, we should go back and add referrals throughout the site to your new piece of content. This interweaving of links provides users with a better experience and more trust in your content, and provides search crawlers with more context to the expected content on your new page, even on the first day of publication.
How many posts or pages should you update?
Neil Patel's team recommends updating your old content with fresh links whenever possible. Their team recently stated for each piece of new content on your site, you should update 20 other pieces of content on your site. If you are a small business, you may not even have 20 pages. With this in mind, I recommend starting with the 3-5 pages you linked to in the last recommendation and growing from there. As long as the links are natural, and not forced into the content, you will see value.
Updating posts does mean updating the content on these pages, not just adding a menu item or a quick link at the bottom of the article. You need to work these changes into your content naturally for them to be the most effective. It is not just about the link, but about the context it provides.  Take this opportunity to bring that piece of content up to snuff with the rest of your site to keep everything feeling fresh.

SEO Titles Tags and Meta descriptions

Title tags and Article titles are not required to be the same. Hopefully, that didn't blow your mind. The Title Tag and the Meta Description, in SEO, are the suggestions you are providing to the search crawler to tell them what you believe the content on that page to be. The content of these tags does not need to be present on the visible user side of the page.
I like to think of these as search advertisements, targeting where people's minds are while searching for an answer. These are Pre-Article-Reading states of mind.
How can you make your titles and meta descriptions about how you will solve the inquiry/search they have made with your article and not about the post-reading state of your article? What question are they asking, how will your page solve that query?
A great example:

Take-Aways

Each new piece of content you create is an opportunity to expand your website's content and provide articles for your social media and newsletters. New content is also an opportunity to identify and update content all over your website. These updates create a better user experience for the people who are lucky enough come to your site. Reward them with great content that is easy to read, always feels fresh, is navigable, and provides them with links to the other pages on your site.

 

Posted in Content Creation, SEO

About Casey Barnett