Blog Post SEO: Expert Tips to Improve Your Ranking

I’m sure you probably have read all sorts of advice regarding a proper blog post SEO. I’m confident enough to say that a lot of that stuff is junk, okay? Forget about it. Delete them from your memory bags, move on, and reformat your mind when it comes to the phrase blog post SEO.

I know that’s a bold claim. But here’s the problem. A lot of the blog post SEO advice currently on the internet are simply outdated. Again, that’s another bold claim. But you see, Google is evolving faster than your typical virus.

It just does an amazing job of keeping track and staying ahead of consumer trends. You see, Google is using artificial intelligence machine learning. What that means is the more people use Google, the more they train Google to process and make sense of information like them.

Does this sound scary? Well, it should! The more you use Google, the more you train it to evaluate information or detect context the way you do. You have to understand that when you’re on Google, it doesn’t stop paying attention to you the moment it gives you a search result.

It actually tracks what links you click and how long you stay. This is especially true if the user is using Google Chrome browser. If you put all this data points together, then it’s easy to see why user experience has become more and more important to Google.

Gone are the days of just simply getting the right back links or blasting out enough back links. While back links are still important to rank, they’re not the only game in town. In fact, the importance of back links continues to shrink year after year as far as Google is concerned.

If you want to do blog post SEO correctly, you need to follow these tips.

Focus on questions your actual users ask

I don’t care what niche you’re in. I don’t care how esoteric or exotic your niche is. People are going to be asking questions about your niche. You have to be prepared for this. You have to format your content in such a way that people can easily see that their questions are being addressed by your blog post. This is crucial to blog post SEO. You have to think in terms of questions and answer.

Google rewards this because when somebody types in a question and Google produces your blog post as a result, people are more likely to click through. The more people click through and stay, the more Google rewards you by increasing your ranking. That’s how it works.

Also, Google will show your answer in a snippet. Now, a lot of people have problems with this because this is basically Google scraping content from many different sources. Often times, people don’t even need to click through because the answer is already there.

Still, this is the small price you pay to get to the top of Google. Also, once Google ranks one of your posts, it also starts to rank your other post. So consider this as a lost leader, so to speak, for improved rankings.

Format your blog post to be read

Another key blog post SEO tip you need to wrap your mind around involves formatting. You can’t just dump text onto a page and call it a day. You have to make it readable. Remember, the rank brain update pays attention to how long people stay on your blog post.

If it turns out that people aren’t staying that long and are completely bouncing out, that’s going to be a problem. Google is going to demote your ranking.

So do yourself a big favor and format your content in terms of subheadings, bold fonts, and sub subheadings.

Blog post SEO is all about value

Finally, focus on your content choices. At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself: What value is this to the reader?

If you can’t come up with a straight answer that is convincing, forget that topic. Move on to the next one. The good news is that it’s very easy to find blog topic ideas. The key to effective blog post SEO is to find the right topic, format it correctly, and make sure it makes an impact.

Pick the right pictures

I wish I can tell you that SEO in 2020 is as easy and predictable as SEO in 2010 or even 2012 when Google Panda was first rolled out. Sadly, if I were to tell you that, I would just be fantasizing. Real SEO nowadays is all about adopting a holistic approach.

Holistic? That’s right-every single element on the page of your website must aid in getting that page ranked well by Google. This is very hard to do for many online publishers because they think posting online is just that-posting content online automatically or quickly. They don’t think strategically.

They are thinking that they just need to get anything published; guest posts or their own work and they can call it a day. They comfort themselves with the idea that SEO is something that you do in another context and at another time. In their minds, publishing and SEO are not directly related much less joined at the hip.

No wonder so many bloggers and online publishers fail in the SEO game. They operate on two different tracks. Sadly, these tracks don’t support each other and lend to overall SEO success. Take the case of picking pictures.

You might think that picking out pictures for your blog post is just a simple matter of picking out what looks good. Dead wrong. You have to pick out pictures that increase view time. In other words, don’t just pick something relevant but pick something that would enhance people’s enjoyment of your post.

Also, make sure you pick pictures that can be shared easily on social media. This enhances the amount of ‘social signals’ your content gets and this plays a big role in blog post SEO.

That’s how you play the game. Otherwise, you’re playing the game to lose.