Blogs are a huge driving force for SEO. However, you can publish hundreds of articles on your website only to have it remain unread, unshared, and unprofitable. So spending efforts on writing non-SEO optimized blog posts would be a big waste.

In fact, your articles can be ranked on the first page of Google, but unless they are optimized for SEO, it won't happen. In this article, we are going to share with you some SEO tips that will help improve your search engine ranking and visibility.

1. Identify your main keywords

You need to think of ideas of keywords that you must include in your blog post. This list will consist of all phrases and keywords related to a given topic. Think like your target audience, what terms will they use to search on Google? These terms are your keywords!

Please note that you will get a multitude of suggestions. However, you should focus on the keywords that you think are the most relevant, and that generate a large amount of search volume. Also, don't forget to select one or two long tail keywords that answer your audience's questions, rely on these phrases to build your article and generate quality traffic.

The more you use these long tail phrases, the more likely you are that a search engine will find your article and make it appear in the first search results.

2. Integrate your keywords in some elements of the article: 

Although themes provide a structure for your content strategy, keywords still play an important role in the SEO of your blog post.

Keywords are the most effective way to help search engines understand the entire content of your blog.

Here are the essential elements that should contain your main keywords:

Title of the article

The title is one of the main elements that search engines rely on to understand the content of a page. So make sure you choose your main keyword well and insert it into the

The meta description should:

Be brief, about 135-150 characters long.

Be clear, concise, and descriptive

Contain the most relevant keywords

As you write, try to include the keywords identified earlier in your article. These should fit naturally into the text, without affecting the user experience.

Be careful! Don't do keyword stuffing, which is the practice of filling the content with a lot of keywords, making your article particularly unpleasant, tedious and difficult to read. Indeed, not only will it irritate your readers, but your article will be penalized by Google. So stick to the most important keywords, and use them effectively to write a readable and understandable blog post.

Images

Once the text is perfect, you will need to add images to illustrate your article and capture the attention of the readers. In fact, adding images is a practice that is often overlooked despite its importance.

In order to use images effectively for SEO, you need to add the alt text (the alt tag), the caption and a small description. Also, it is essential that the images are professional and consistent with the theme of the article for a better aesthetic of the page.

URLs

The page URL is another important ranking factor. Whenever possible, make sure to include your keywords in your address and URL and make it SEO-Friendly. Also, make sure your URLs are not too long before they are published (it is best not to exceed 100 characters).

3. Focus on long-form content

As a general rule, the longer your content is, the better it will rank in search results. This may be due to the fact that Google believes that longer content is more valuable. Another benefit of long-form content is that it can increase the amount of time visitors stay on the page (Session Time). This duration is one of the factors used by search engines to rank you.

How many words to write? Try to keep the average number of words per article to at least 900-1000, and avoid articles with 300-500 words.

4. Insert internal links

Backlinks are an SEO element that keeps a primary place in the ranking of a page on search engines. However, getting other websites to link back to your page can be a challenge, but that doesn't stop you from doing as many internal links as possible on your own site. Think of all the blog posts you've already published that may be related to what you're currently writing, identify them, and use anchor text containing your keyword to point to them.

5. Insert external links

External links are links that point to content that exists on another website. Adding links to relevant and trustworthy websites can increase the credibility of your articles and thus improve their ranking in search engines. External links are a good way to reference relevant data or ideas that can provide more information to your readers and connect your brand to other reputable websites.

In short SEO can be very complicated, but understanding the basics will give you a good start. Write content that is relevant to your target audience and make sure it is better than your competitors.