There is a huge amount of literature with hundreds of tips on how to write a good blog post. Just to name a few examples: 10 tips for an Awesome and SEO-friendly Blog Post, The On-Page SEO Cheat Sheet, and How to Fix the 4 Biggest Problems with Content Writers. Your aim, and mine, is to reach a good ranking in search engine results in order to drive traffic to your website. How can we achieve this?

Have you figured out now which are my chosen keywords?

In order to write a good article, SEO and Content Marketing gurus recommend that the selected key term shouldn’t be repeated again and again. This common strategy is known as keyword stuffing. Google is constantly improving its algorithms to detect customised and machine-generated content: they want an excellent user experience and demand quality content instead of ‘thin content’. Therefore, Google has been penalising in the last years a high density of repeated words in their page rankings.  Experts recommend not exceeding a 3% of keyword density (30 repeated keywords for an article of 1000 words). You are warned now, be aware of the sophisticated algorithms of Big G!

How can we avoid this? A handy solution is to find synonyms or terms semantically related. You can find an example of this in the paragraph above. Have you found it? No? In the first line of the second paragraph, I deliberately used article instead of blog post. I searched before in Google for blog post and I checked the suggested related searches. One of them was article. This is a tip I found here. The idea behind is that it is important, when doing your keyword research, to look for semantically related terms in order to improve your content quality (Content is King and Google is watching you!).

Have you now a better idea of the focus keywords of this article? No? I will give you more tips then on how to write a good blog post. Have you noticed the green highlighted text in the previous sentence? With this hint I’m sure you will definitely guess it: using your keywords in the linked text will help you rank better. Please don’t tell me you still don’t know which are my chosen keywords… Yes, you are very close!

But now you will tell me that my keyword(s) is too long, and you might be right. However, before starting to write your post, you need to conduct a thorough keyword research. For this purpose, Google’s Keyword Planner is extremely useful. With this tool you will be able to know how many searches have been done with a given keyword. Your aim is to find a term or set of terms that have a lot of demand: topics with a high number of searches. At the same time, we need to do some research to know if there are already too many websites with those keywords. How do we do this? Simple and easy, we just perform a normal search of the keywords in Google preceded by allintitle:. Have you clicked on the link? (Please do, links are easy and wonderful, I might rank better now!)

If you have clicked on the link you must know now my keywords, and yes, you are right: they are How to write a good blog post. First I thought just like you that it was a too long string of keywords, but my research gave me good arguments to use it: there was enough demand (an average of 480 exact match monthly searches), but a very low supply: only 326 websites containing those exact keywords in their title. If I were a trader of words, I would have material here to get rich!

Digital marketers like Brendan Maguire insist on the importance of the allintitle search for an effective keyword research:  it is free and easy. As a matter of fact, anything which is below 10,000 allintitle results is considered a good result. Considering that my search produced only 326 pages, are you less sceptical now about my chosen terms?

I will give you a couple of tips more, but briefly, because I have already written 750 words, and the recommended length for a good blog posts goes from 800 to 1000. Alright. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. I hope it doesn’t, because I am going to post one and my blog would be twice as long for the best SEO practices!

There are a couple of reasons why I have added an image. First, because it makes the reading easier: it accompanies the text and illustrates it, quite needed in such a text-heavy article like this one. On the other hand, and for SEO purposes, it is important to add Alt Text to the picture containing our keywords. I have done so, and they are relevant to the picture. Alt Text is a description of the picture aimed to help visually impaired people to understand the picture.

Oops, I am about to run out of words, and I need to trade with them! One last point: there are many, many factors to take into account in order to improve our SEO: it is said that Google uses at least 200 in their algorithm, and I only have a couple of lines left. To wrap up, we aim to create meaningful, engaging and interesting content; with informative value that will make the visitor stay and read our lines until the end. For that purpose, it is essential that the post has a good structure and a logical progression, with clearly defined titles, paragraphs, and connecting phrases.

Are you still reading? If so, it means that the content and the structure of this article is not too bad. I might even have been able to write a good blog post!