How to write optimized blog posts for your website.

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Hey everybody. My name is Derek Schmidt. And today I want to talk to you about how you go about writing an optimized blog post for your website.

Tips for how to write a blog post for beginners.

So, when you’re creating a post for your blog, obviously step one is to provide as much value as you can to your reader, right? You don’t want to just create a post just to have something on your blog. That’s the wrong way of going about it. Instead, it’s better if you create one really good blog post per month, that users actually find value in … and they’re reading through.

And so how you go about writing that blog post? It’s very similar to what you were taught in grade school when you were learning how to write a paper or an essay, for example.

Generally, you have an introductory paragraph. This is a brief paragraph that explains what the reader’s going to get through the rest of the article or the blog post. And then you start with paragraph one, if I’m using the example from your paper or your essay in grade school.

How to structure a blog post.

Now paragraph one, I’m going to call that heading one (H1). You have things in websites and HTML, such as heading one (H1), heading two (H2), heading three (H3), four (H4), five (H5), six (H6), et cetera. But how do you know when to use them and how often to use them?

So think of it like this: paragraph one generally has the heading one, right before the second paragraph. Now the second paragraph would expand upon whatever you typed into heading one. Then following that you’ll have heading two. Heading two, again, just kind of explains the sub paragraph and what they’re going to learn in that section. Then you’ve got heading three and heading four and heading five.

Now, in terms of how many times you use this, you should only have one heading one tag on a page. Now, some people will debate that and say, with HTML5 and defining sections and everything, you can have more than h1 tag, but for non-technical people just have one heading one tag. Following that you can have two to three heading two tags.

You can have up to three to five heading three tags. And about as many as you want on the heading four, five and six, if it’s required. In terms of the length of the post, what you should write about and how long it should be, try to aim for a minimum of a thousand words. Now you can get by with 500 words, if it’s a really valuable article. However, Googles whole thing is they crawl the text on your website, right? And that’s how they find out, what your article is about … Does it match what the user is searching for?

So try to aim for having at least a thousand words on a blog post and then look for keyword density. This is how often your keyword shows up within that article. And so for every 100 words, you want to have your keyword in there about two to three times. This is the keyword that you’re trying to rank for, right?

And so that’s a term called keyword density. You want to aim to have about a 2% – 3% keyword density. Now don’t get me wrong, your article is not about stuffing this content full of keywords or seeming really spamming. Ultimately, your job is to provide a lot of value to your readers so that they stay on your blog posts, they read the whole thing. They potentially explore other parts of the website. So aim for a keyword density of 2% – 3%.

You can underline and bold things throughout the article. Always try to include at least one image. It’s way better if you can include a custom image and not just some stock image. I think everybody’s just kind of tuned out lately to stock photography. They no longer resonate with that, but we are aesthetic creatures. So you want to have some visual elements to it.

So What Makes a Successful Blog Post?

If you can have a video that’s even better. Link the video in your article. Now, how you can get into a rhythm of creating these images and these videos, is just set aside a day, once a week or a couple times a month, where you just knock out a bunch of photography around the office, or a bunch of videos around the office relevant to what you’re going to be writing about or what you’re seeing in the business or what your clients may be searching for, or pains that they’re going through. And then try to write articles around that.

So last thing I want to share with you, it’s a really easy thing, but a lot of people forget it. When you’re adding an image to your blog posts or your website in general, you definitely want to include the “alt” tag. Now, when you upload an image, you should be prompted to include what’s called “alt” text.

This is a really easy place for you to include a keyword, but it’s also … really easy place for you to make your website more accessible to people who may be visually impaired, right? Google has no idea what images are about. You can generally include a description and the alt attribute, and that tells Google what this image is about. But it’s also what is read off to users who have some sort of visual impairment.

So don’t forget to include your alt tags in your images. Create a structured article with one heading one tag, two to three heading two tags, three to five heading three, and so on, and then supporting paragraphs for each section.

Conclusion

Again, at the end of the day, it’s mainly about providing value to the user. These things are just icing on the cake, adds a few more bells and whistles. Should help you with your ranking, but ultimately it should help you convert some more users for your web traffic.

Did I miss anything? Is there anything you would add to this? If you have any questions, please drop them in the comments.