The SEO techniques of 2018 that you ought to know before writing a blog post are not that tough to understand. All you need is to keep going through each of these techniques in detail to get the
perfect SEO score for your blog post. Keep in mind that these are mostly on-page optimization techniques, with a couple of off page
SEO techniques mentioned at the end.
Also Read:
List of Top 7 Google Adsense Revenue Sharing Sites
SEO Techniques 2018 – Content writing basic techniques
All SEO Techniques, either on-page or off-page, when applied perfectly, will help your blog post in reaching the maximum potential that it can get from search engines. Backlinks are important part of SEO and are very helpful if you get it from the same category website as yours.
But the on page optimization of a blog post is what that makes search engines know about the search keywords and key phrases to rank it for. The following is a list of SEO techniques that I will discuss with you in detail. They are:
A Short and meaningful Link Structure
You blog post link should be short and unique for each blog post. A long link doesn’t make at the top of
google search engine result pages because google prefers short and search accurate links for the top. Also when sharing links users prefer to click links that give out a message, like for example a link like this is easily understood and clicked by any viewer:
akblogs.com/2018/09/increase-domain-authority.html
It describes some things about the blog post too, like the blog posts name and main keyword and what the blog post is about. Also the date of publishing of the blog post is mentioned.
Your main focus should be to make your website links short and accurate regarding your main keyword. A link character length of 50~65 characters is preferred by search engines.
Subheadings
Your content should be divided into paragraphs and headings and all or some headings should have subheadings which includes using h2, h3, h4, h5 and h6 tags. This organizes data for the search engine bot and tells the bot about your post and everything included in the post.
Heading tags should be between 15 and 65 characters
The heading tags of a post are of 5 types. They are:
- H1
- H2
- H3
- H4
- H5
- H6
H1 tag is the title tag of a post. This tag belongs to the title of the post and should not be used by any other text except the title. Using this tag twice would harm your blog post’s SEO as well as not using it.
H2 tags and all following tags are subheading that are used to format text documents. From H2 tags and onwards, the size of headings as well as their hierarchical value keeps on decreasing step by step.
Paragraphs should not be too long
Your content, divided into paragraphs, is further divided into sentences. Make sure not to stuff all the data and information into one single long paragraph. Separating data and information into well-defined paragraphs each of which has a different and unique subject will help users get a better view of your content. This will also enhance the appealing look of the written content material.
Either your content has only text or has images in it, make sure to divide each paragraph according to the changes in subject. If, however, you cannot shorten a paragraph based on its subject, make sure to cut the paragraphs into further paragraphs each of which has at most 5 sentences.
Sentences should be no longer than 20 words
When I say this I make sure to give you an example from this very article. As you can see none of the sentences is very long. At most I presume each of the sentences is almost 10~15 words long. This will make the paragraph appealing and your content will be formatted accordingly.
But if you encounter longer sentences which are more than 20 words long. They will not affect your content’s SEO but rather make your content less appealing. Also a person’s interest may lessen when reading longer sentences. Make sure to divide these to shorter sentences that are not longer than 20 words.
Keywords or keyphrases should be unique for each post
Keywords are most important for a website’s SEO. Choosing one for each post should be such that no two posts have the same keywords. Although inorder to write within your website’s niche, you might want to do it. But this is not a good approach.
As search engines can detect that your website is trying to spam them by using the same keyword again and again. Choose your focus keywords wisely for related posts. You need to change atleast one word from your long tail keyword to not make it the same as any other post.
Meta description should be present
Meta description is a short description below each search result that gives a brief description about the blog post or article. It helps the people searching to get a good idea of the searched content.
Your blog post should have a meta description. The rule of thumb for this is your blog post’s meta description should not be the title of the blog post. As blog posts that have the same post title and meta description tend to get their meta description removed by search engines when the blog post is indexed. Instead the search engines show text from the blog post instead.
Meta description should be 120~150 characters long
The best SEO practice in 2018 is to keep your blog post’s meta description from 120 to 150 characters. The reason being that any number of characters exceeding the 150th are removed from the search results. So it doesn’t really matter how much you write. This is one of the very important SEO techniques. So the 150th character should be the final character that should be under your consideration while writing a blog post’s meta description.
You should write a brief and to the point description for your posts. Most importantly, don’t forget to add your blog post’s keyword or keyphrase in your meta description. Which is kind of hard, but it has to be done for the better SEO of your blog post.
There should not be multiple meta description tags.
The meta tag, , should not be repeated within a blog post. Same like having multiple h1 title tags, multiple meta tags reduce your blog post’s SEO score. This is one of the very important SEO techniques.
The blog post should not be less than 300 words
Length of an article is an important part of any blog post. What if you went to a site looking for good material on “how to do stuff” and after about 50 words of description, the post shows you an embedded
video from youtube on “how to do stuff” and that’s it. The post ends there.
Although the video is to the point and describes perfectly the content “how to do stuff”. But according to google search bot, the blog post has only few words. Almost 50 in this case, excluding title and meta description words.
It is highly unlikely that your post gets to the target potential you want. So the obvious solution to this is to write content that explains the problem as well as all the alternatives of its solution. You don’t need to remove the video but you do need to add more content regarding your problem “how to do stuff”. Add your own experience or hire a professional writer to add content for you.
According to Neil Patel’s
SEO analyzer, content rich pages are likely to rank high in search engine result pages.
Your blog posts should have atleast 1 external links
Links of a webpage are further divided into two types. This division is based on the target site’s address. These are
- External links
- Internal links
External links are those type of links that are pointed towards an outside website. Either you own the outside website or not is irrelevant. As long as the linked page does not belong to the same domain, it is considered an external link.
These type of links are further divided into two types.
- Do follow links
- No follow links
The type of external link you use is irrelevant, however atleast one external link should exist within an article. This is considered to make an article diverse. Do follow links are considered an important part of
guest blogging.
Your blog posts should have atleast 1 internal links
The second type of link that a webpage can have and in our case, should have, is an internal link. The internal link from a post to a relevant post builds a better link structure. Not only does this improves your site’s visibility but also its relevance to a new user.
Atleast one internal link is necessary to make up for a site’s SEO. Google checks all the pages that a page links to and is linked from, so if google bot sees relevant links pointing to a domain it will definitely increase its authority.
Your blog post’s title should be at most 75 characters long
The blog post’s title, also the h1 tag, is an important part of a blog post’s SEO structure. You should keep in mind that a good title consists of two parts. One is the main focus keywords, it should always have the main focus keywords in it. The other is a bunch of text that makes it being click worthy.
Click worthy means that if a person searching for the focus keywords, looks into your page and he should click on it. Not clicking it would mean that your post title was not click worthy so he passed it for a better search result.
Your blog posts should have not dynamic links in it
Links that are always changing are called dynamic links. If you are using tags, every time you post a new blog post, all your tags are automatically configured according to the new blog post. These tags have pages linked to them that keep on changing as you post new articles within these tags.
It is a good practice to minimize their use.
Compress your images beforehand
Compress all your images before uploading them to your website. The size of images plays an important role in your webpage’s page speed which is an important SEO factor while considering a website’s efficiency.
Google hates slow loading sites, so it’s better to compress all images beforehand. You can use tools like
imagecompressor for this.
All images within a blog post should have ALT attributes
Alt tags are important for describing an image to a search bot. Since search bots don’t know what an image is about, alt tags help them identifying what the image is about. This way search bots index your images for related image searches that drive traffic to your website through images.
Your blog posts should have atleast 1 image
It is quite obvious that without images you can’t really attract visitors. When sharing on social media, a good post title with a nicely drawn graphic image will boost the number of your website’s click. Without images it is hard to sell a topic which is only text.
Your blog posts should have lots of backlinks
The only two SEO techniques in this article that are off page SEO techniques are these two. These are related to your post’s quality and relevance to a specific topic and niche. Also these are important SEO techniques so their importance cannot be neglected.
Getting a backlink from a same niche site will increase your
blog’s domain authority and your
blog post’s page authority. Also since domain authority is directly related to your website’s SEO score, it will also improve your website’s SEO ranking.
Your website’s backlinks determine the quantity of search visits your website gets. Work hard on getting relevant backlinks from high domain authority websites.
Your blog posts should have a high number of indexed pages
Finally
submit your website to Google and Bing search engine consoles to get the most out of your blog’s SEO. You won’t want to do all this effort and not get any result so always submit your blog posts and articles to these search engines every time.
Also Read:
List of Top 7 Google Adsense Revenue Sharing Sites
So that’s all the SEO techniques in 2018 you need to know before starting a new blog post, if you need any help you can request my
SEO services through my
fiverr gig. I will gladly help you out.
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