5 On-Page SEO Techniques For Ranking Blog Posts

Anirban Kundu Avatar
Updated March 28, 2016

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5 On-Page SEO Techniques For Blog Posts

Are you sure that your blog posts adhere to the on-page SEO best practices?

As the competition in the digital marketing space becomes more intense with every passing year, the battle for the top positions in search engine results continues to become fiercer. Countless new websites are launched every year, each vying for the customer’s attention. Unless you are on the top of the search results, your posts will largely go unnoticed and will make little or no impact on your digital marketing efforts.

Essential on-page SEO techniques for every blog post:

Many bloggers think that On-page SEO is difficult, as it requires them to know how to change parts of their website or blog. However, it is not always too complicated. You just have to know what to do. Once you have optimized a few posts, you will certainly get used to them.

So here are a few on-page SEO factors that you need to pay attention to for every blog post that you create.

1. Do thorough keyword research:

The best way to get noticed by readers is to write on topics that are currently trending or can solve a pertinent problem that people are facing. For example, if you are writing on a website that sells paddleboards, then you will find that many newcomers are not sure about how to learn paddleboarding in the first place. A great way to get their notices is to tell them about the five best places where they can learn paddle boarding, or about some do’s and don’ts and give them beginners tips to get them started.

You can use the free keyword research tool in Google AdWords and Google trends to do the keyword research. Twitter is a great social resource to find trending topics. You can also use premium tools like BuzzSumo to discover topics being discussed and being shared actively on different social platforms.

2. Check Keyword density:

Once you have chosen a keyword, go ahead and write the post in the most natural way possible. While writing the post, you should not use the keyword too often. How many times you use the keyword in your blog post constitutes the keyword density for your blog post. In simple terms:

Remember

Keyword Density = (Number of keywords/Total number of words in the blog post)

If the keyword density is too high, then Google will treat your article as low quality, and may even penalize your site. Ideally, a keyword density of 1% to 2.5% is considered to be ideal for on-page SEO.

Tip

As an on-page SEO best practice: distribute the keywords in the sentences throughout the post very strategically, so that it does not become very apparent to the readers.

3. Place the Keywords in the right places:

Apart from the paragraphs in the article, you are to ensure that the keyword is also placed in certain important places:

  • Permalink or URL
  • Header tags (i.e. H2, H3, etc.)
  • Meta title
  • Meta description
  • Image title
  • Image ALT text

The permalinks should be well constructed to get the maximum on-page SEO benefits. Remember the following:

a. Avoid Stop Words:

It is always better to use short URLs to make the Permalinks look clean and easily readable. For this reason, it is recommended to remove stop words like: and, though, a, or, etc. from it.

b. Start with the keywords:

Place the keywords at the beginning of the URLs to get the maximum SEO benefits. One important point to note is that there is no requirement that the URL should be the same as the title of your blog post. It is perfectly okay if you construct these in different ways to make them SEO friendly.

5. Include images:

Posts with images attract more traffic and engagement from users than text-only blogs. So go ahead and include at least one image in your post. Be careful though: never use copyrighted images directly downloaded from the Internet, as they can land you in serious legal trouble.

As mentioned earlier, the title of the image and its ALT Text contain the keyword. This is a sure-shot way to get more SEO points from the search engines.

Use an SEO Plugin:

If your blog is hosted on WordPress, then you can use a plug-in like Yoast SEO or All in One SEO Pack to ensure that your blog posts adhere to these on-page SEO best practices. If there is any error, or anything is not optimized properly, then these plugins will show alerts. You may correct these errors by yourself, or in some cases, the plug-in can also do it for you. Use of and is your plug-in is highly recommended for every WordPress blog.

If you have a custom website, then there are tons of free tools available on the Internet that you can make use of. Choose the ones you need to ensure that your blog posts are optimised well.

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Updated March 28, 2016

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