For some, writing for SEO purposes and writing to attract and captivate your audience could seem two contradictory goals. I totally disagree with this. Indeed, if you not only want a good but also an SEO-friendly blog post, the words you want to be found on should be in a very prominent place. But, using your keywords toooften severely damages the readability of your text. So, you definitely shouldn’t do that.

In this post, I would like to give some tips on writing blog posts that are both very readable as well as SEO-friendly. I genuinely think those two goals should (and easily can!) go hand in hand.

Elementary writing tips for good blog posts

Before anything, your blog post just has to be a good piece of writing! A lot of bloggers just begin to write when creating a new blog post. They just type what comes to mind. For some, this may be sufficient because they are natural writing talents. Others might need some help. I always follow the next set of ‘rules’ myself.

1. Think before you write!

Think hard about the message of your text. What do you want to tell your readers or which central question do you want to ask? What’s the purpose of your text? And what do you want your readers to do at the end of the page? Write down the answers to these questions before you begin writing.

Adding actual and functional information to your website will give Google the idea that your website is alive. If it’s not an active website, Google will crawl it less often. This might affect your rankings negatively.

10. Use our Yoast SEO plugin.

The content analysis tool of our Yoast SEO plugin helps you write an SEO-friendly blog post. You start by choosing your focus keyword. This is the most important search term you want people to find this particular page for. Our plugin checks your post to see whether you use the keyword in the right places, and it measures many other aspects of the text. These are the most important ones:

• The plugin allows you to formulate a meta description.
• The plugin analyzes the text you write. It calculates a Flesch reading ease score, which indicates the readability of your article.
• It checks whether or not you used your keyword in 5 important locations: the article-heading, the title of the page, the URL of the page, the content of the article and the meta-description.
• The plugin also checks the presence of links in your article and the presence of images in the article.
• It calculates the number of words and the density of usage of the focus keyword in the article.
• Above that, the plugin also checks whether or not other pages on your website use the same focus keyword, to prevent you from competing with yourself.

If you write a relatively SEO-friendly blog post (based on the aspects mentioned before) the plugin will indicate this with a green bullet. Writing pages with green bullets will help you improve the ranking of the pages on your website.

Note that not every dot has to be green for the overall score to be “good”. For instance, these are the results of this post, which does have a “good” score:

If you’re not on WordPress, we also have this Page Analysis tool available on our site. It’s still in beta, so we’d love your feedback!

Looking for more optimization? Check out our Yoast SEO Premium plugin!

Conclusion

The era in which some SEO tricks were sufficient to get your website to rank high in Google has long ended. Nowadays, good content is king. And good content also leads to more Facebook likes and shares, tweets and return visitors to your website. Of course, you can do some extra things to maximize the SEO friendliness of your post, but most important is: just write a very, very good post!

Resource: yoast.com