How to write for the web? Writing is fairly simple, it’s all the optimization for SEO and visibility that goes behind it that is more complicated. In this article, I will explain why you absolutely need to know how to write for the web and I will show you how.
Writing blog posts is part of the SEO content strategy which is the 3rd major pillar of natural referencing. Out of a total of 4, all must be optimized to gain in natural referencing. The other three pillars are:
You need blog posts, that’s obvious. You have the choice to do it yourself or to outsource it to a web writer —> See my proposal.
Why is writing for the web good for your visibility?
For social media
Writing blog posts allows you to have relevant and optimized content to share on your social networks, while improving the visibility of your website and strengthening your content strategy.
To prove your expertise
A corporate blog is an excellent lever to provide added value for free, strengthen your content strategy, improve your natural referencing, and demonstrate your professional expertise on subjects related to your sector.
For much more visibility
Writing articles for the web allows gaining visibility on search engines, attracting qualified traffic, and increasing the number of prospects on your website thanks to relevant, structured, and well-positioned content.
It’s especially the last point that is important to me: natural referencing.
Referencing or SEO is a set of techniques aimed at making a website visible in search engines. We have seen that there are 4 main pillars to work on a website. Text content is one of these SEO pillars.
The 3rd pillar is content. How can we work on content on a website? The best way remains blogging. Writing a blog post is the best way to add new content regularly and over the long term. And Google loves that.
If you wish to gain visibility and have maximum traffic on your website, you need a blog. Writing blog posts will allow you to attract traffic to your site and then you can redirect them to your main pages to convert them into customers.
Conclusion: you must write blog posts.
How to write a blog post and optimize it for Google?
Do not miss the conclusion of this article which summarizes all these steps.
1. The right structure
There is no truly right structure for a blog post. There are way too many variables to take into account such as the theme and topic of the article. I still tried to summarize all the techniques, types of subjects, and structures of a blog post.
Here is one of the blog post structures I like the most. It is the structure used to write this blog post. Note that it is also adaptable for YouTube videos.
- Introduction: I like to write 2-3 lines to introduce my subject and explain what I’m going to talk about
- What to remember: I very often add a small box to quickly summarize what to remember from the article. It’s a very important point.
- Call to action: before getting to the heart of the matter, I refer readers to a free or paid product relevant to the topic of the article
- Content of my article: I structure my article into several clear and distinct parts
- FAQ: ending with an FAQ maximizes chances of appearing in AI results and positioning on long-tail keywords.
- Call to action: at the end of my article, I try to increase reader engagement by asking them to share or comment on my article.
- Thanks: to finish, I thank the reader for reading the article to the end.
The right methodology for SEO
Here we really get into the heart of the matter because anyway, writing a blog post that no one will see isn’t very useful. In 99% of cases, you will need to optimize it for Google.
1st step: Do keyword research
Keyword research will be done before defining the subject of your blog post. Why? Because you have no idea of the right topic to address. The only way to know is to ask your audience what interests them. Fortunately in SEO, we can know.
Google gives us access to its databases to know the queries internet users type every month into Google. With this data, we will be able to identify the questions internet users are asking themselves.
The objective of writing a blog post will be to answer these questions. For example, if Google gives me the keyword “How to write a blog post”, I will hasten to write an article to answer this question. I know internet users search for this, so the subject interests them. Thus, the internet user will be able to discover my website and potentially become a customer or recommend me.
The goal is to identify 1 or 2 main keywords per blog post.
In SEO, we don’t invent keywords, we help ourselves at Google and sort through thousands of keywords. To identify the best ones, there are mainly 4 criteria to consider:
- Keyword relevance: regarding your theme
- Search intent: it is very important to consider the user’s expectation behind a query
- Keyword popularity: the more the keyword is searched, the more traffic there will be to your website
- Difficulty: the more articles there are on the same subject, the lower the position of the article will be.
Keyword research is the first step to write a good blog post. Useless to write an article if you haven’t studied the keywords.
In website SEO optimization, there are mainly 4 types of search intent to identify:
- Purchase intent: the internet user is looking for a product or service to buy.
- Investigative intent: the internet user is looking for a product or service but doesn’t know which one yet. They are searching for information with the intent to buy
- Informational intent: the internet user is searching for information but without intent to buy. This is the basic intent for writing blog articles.
- Brand intent: special case, the internet user searches directly for the name of a brand or company in Google.
For our example, the chosen keyword is “How to write a blog post?”. This is an informational search intent, you are reading this article because you wish to know how to write an article yourself and not outsource it to a freelancer.
—> The written tutorial to perform a keyword study
2nd step: The title tag
Once the main keyword of the blog post is identified, it will be necessary to define what we are going to talk about. The identified keyword will have to appear a bit everywhere and be well placed. Firstly, it must be placed in the title tag.
The title tag is the most important tag for SEO, it appears only in search results. Note that it can be different from the article title. On WordPress, it is in Yoast SEO (or any other SEO plugin) that you determine your Title tag (SEO Title in Yoast).
Your title tag must be about 60 characters to be 100% in search results. Exploit all the necessary space to add as many keywords as possible. Note that your Title can perfectly well be longer than 60 characters, it won’t be penalized by Google.
The role of your Title tag is double:
- Your title tag must be unique and must contain THE important keyword of the article and if possible as far to the left as possible, at the beginning of the title.
- A title tag must be optimized for Google but also make the user want to click. It must be “clicky”.
For our example: the title of the article is “SEO Writing: 3rd pillar of SEO” but the title tag is “How to write a blog post and optimize it for Google?”. There is indeed my keyword in the title and in the title tag.
3rd step: The page content
We can now tackle writing the blog post. When writing a blog post, we address two entities:
- The internet user
So you have to both bring a lot of value to the internet user (free advice and tutorials) and also give Google what it wants.
What Google wants is first to understand what your blog post is about (semantics) and it wants to have a lot of content. For Google, size matters and it is measured in number of words.
Google considers a page to be of low quality when it counts fewer than 300 words. I recommend that each page be at least 1000 words to be judged as quality, knowing that Google tends to prefer ranking pages of over 3000 words in first position.
It is also important to highlight important words or phrases by putting them in “bold“. This attracts the user’s eye and indicates important terms to Google.
Keyword density is also important. For a 1000-word article, the keyword must be repeated at least 10 times.
Writing a blog post well for Google will involve (partly):
- 1000 words minimum (content size depends on competition)
- Quality content
- Important words and phrases in bold
- A certain density of main keywords
- Adding main keywords of the article in “hot” locations such as:
- The first paragraph
- At the beginning of sentence and beginning of paragraph generally
- In Hn tag
- In the last paragraph
- Adding secondary and semantic keywords
In our example: this blog post is over 2500 words.
4th step: Hn Tags
Hn tags structure the HTML code of a web page. Invisible to the reader’s eyes, they are mainly addressed to Google bots to allow them to better understand the subject of the page as well as its content.
Each page must have a single H1 which is generally its title. Then come the other tags H2-H3-H4-H5-H6 which must be in order. The title of each tag must be unique and it is interesting to add the article keyword in at least 2 Hn tags (for 1000 words).
Here is an example of an adapted structure (that of this article):
<H1> How to write a blog post? …<H2> Why write a blog post? …<H2> How to write a blog post and optimize it for Google? ………<H3> The right structure ………<H3> The right methodology for SEO ………………<H4> 1st step: ………………<H4> 2nd step: ………………<H4> 3rd step:
You can simply use the WordPress text editor to modify the content.
In our example: my keyword is placed in 3 HN tags.
5th step: Links
How to write a blog post and optimize it without links? The content of a web page is nothing without the links that accompany it. There are 4 different types of links:
- Outgoing internal links
- Incoming internal links
- Outgoing external links
- Incoming external links
Are you following me?
- Outgoing internal links are links that I put from my article to another article on my site, for example: how to optimize your WordPress website?
- Incoming internal links are links placed on other articles of my blog but which refer to this article.
- Outgoing external links are links that I put from my article to another website, for example: my Facebook page
- Incoming external links or backlinks are links from other websites to my blog post.
Links are very important for Google because it uses them to navigate pages (like the internet user by the way). A good blog post must therefore have internal and external outgoing and incoming links. The more a page receives links, the more weight it has for Google, but it must also make links in order to make the internet user navigate from page to page.
Internally, we talk about internal linking, Wikipedia is the perfect example. Externally, it’s a vast subject that I tackle in another article.
I always recommend:
- Adding at least 3 internal links per page and 10 at most for 1000 words.
- Each page must receive at least 3 internal links coming from other pages. Which means that once your article is published, you will have to go back into old articles to add an internal link to the newly written article.
- Add at least 2 non-competing external links per page and 10 at most.
- Always remember to vary link anchors (clickable text). These must be unique and relevant to their destination. It is good to use strong keywords.
Are you still there?
6th step: Image referencing
Besides their utility to illustrate content, images can also bring you organic traffic and are used to optimize a blog post.
Images are generally very heavy and can slow down the website, so their size and weight must be reduced.
To optimize images, you must:
- Rename your images before upload with a relevant keyword: this is a plus for the overall optimization of the blog post and to make the image appear in Google Image and drain even more traffic.
- Reduce the image size to less than 1000px wide.
- Reduce the image weight with online tools like Optimizilla
- You can use this same keyword in the image ALT tag: Go to Media or in the WordPress text editor, you will find a free field “alternative text”: add your keyword.
- You can add a caption to your images, it’s a plus for their referencing.
- When you upload images, avoid using PNG format images, images that are too heavy and too large (greater than 1500px).
- Once uploaded, use WordPress plugins like Imagify to further reduce weight.
- The good weight of an image is less than 100KB (after upload).
I return to UX and images in my article on the second pillar of SEO.
7th step: The meta description tag
The meta description tag, like the title tag appears only in search results. From an SEO point of view, the meta description has no weight but it must always be added.
The meta-description is a unique summary of the page of about 160 characters on average. It must also contain THE important keyword of the article and make people want to click.
On WordPress, it is configured in the same place as the title tag, in Yoast SEO.
For our example: the meta description tag of this blog post is: “Yes, you need a blog to gain visibility and find more customers. I explain how to write a blog post and optimize it.”
8th step: The blog post URL
URLs must be as short as possible while clearly describing the content of the blog post. A good URL also contains the main keyword(s) of the page. The URL has almost no weight in natural referencing but it’s a plus for user experience. Note that on some smartphones, the URL is no longer displayed.
Conclusion
You must remember only 4 elements to write and optimize a blog post:
- The choice of main keywords allows you to identify article topics to write.
- Weighted density: that is, adding important keywords in the hot spots of the article.
- Content size is important. Observe competitors on Google, how many words on average?
- Internal linking is an essential criterion of referencing. Each page must make and receive links.
Choosing the right keyword is essential because if you don’t, you risk wasting time writing a blog post that no one will read. It’s demotivating. You must therefore identify the questions internet users ask themselves to answer them through an article. Your keyword must be relevant, popular, and not too competitive.
Finally, weighted density, what is it? It is simply the density of your keyword relative to its location in the blog post.
Your keyword must therefore be repeated at least 10 times (on average) for a 1000-word article and be placed in these elements:
- The title tag
- The meta description tag
- The first paragraph
- In bold
- At the beginning of sentence and paragraph
- In at least 2 Hn tags
- In incoming internal links
- In incoming external links
- In the title and ALT tag of images
- In the article URL
How to write a blog post and optimize it for Google? I think you now have all the necessary information to succeed in skyrocketing your visibility. If so, share the article and or leave me a comment to give me your opinion.
If you speak a little English, here is a very good video by Neil Patel explaining that to optimize a web page, you have to think “user” and give them what they want.
Thank you for reading the article in full. If blogging interests you, you might be interested in my article on 7 tips to monetize a blog.
