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How To Structure Your Blog Content For Great Rankings

Posted By Jim Stewart 14th of December 2016 Search Engine Optimization 0 Comments

How To Structure Your Blog Content For Great Rankings | ProBlogger.net

From ProBlogger SEO expert Jim Stewart of Bloggers SEO.

Content may be king, but if you don’t optimise your blog content in a way that Google likes, your readers will never find it.

Structuring your content in a way that Google understands means higher rankings across your entire site. This makes your blog more visible to readers searching for your topic, and more likely to show up near the top of the page when they search for your niche.

But how do you know what Google is looking for?

Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is simply a way of organising the content on your site so that it’s more likely that Google will understand it. It’s a process like anything else, and it can be tricky considering all the updates Google sends out. Stick to the fundamentals of content structuring and you’ll see a definite improvement in your rankings.

Search Engine Optimisation Fundamentals

Keywords

Choose one or two long-tail keywords to focus on when optimising your blog posts. These are strings of words that readers might use to look for the content on your blog.

The idea is not to stuff as many keywords as possible into your work, but to concentrate on just one or two and rank well for them. For the best results, pick one keyword string to emphasise per post, and one secondary string, if any. Everything on your page should relate back to these two keywords, and you should incorporate them in specific parts of your blog page.

Blog Post Page Title

The page title is the first thing your readers see, usually in a link that has been shared or in the search results. More importantly, it’s the first thing that Google will see.

The page title should tell Google and the reader what the post is about. If you want to rank for a specific phrase, you’ll need to use it here. Include the keyword within the first 50-60 characters of your page title. If you have a long title, use your keywords at the beginning. Google stops displaying after 60 characters, so anywhere past that is getting too long.

Body and Headers

Most blog CMS/Themes typically will use the page title as the URL and as a H1 at the start of the page. Remember, good SEO is about good content structure, so use your headings accordingly. Don’t have multiple H1s on a page, H2s should follow H1s, and H3s should follow H2s, etc. Each section header should have one of the two keywords incorporated into them. Try to use the same keyword in the first paragraph directly after the header, and use it in a natural manner in the text.

How To Structure Your Blog Content For Great Rankings | ProBlogger.net

URL

Include the keyword in the page URL. Search engines look there to find your page’s relevance, so make sure to include a keyword string in each one. Your CMS or blog theme may just use the page title for the URL, which is perfectly fine.

Meta Description

Your meta description is designed to sum up your blog post in one short sentence. The meta description is limited to a maximum 160 characters and should summarise your page. Include your keyword string to ensure your readers and Google alike know exactly what your page is about. Usually it will be shown in search results, so make it something that people want to click.

Your Blog Content

Getting past the mechanics of putting keywords in the technical spaces in your blog, it’s also important to optimise the actual content that you’re publishing. You’ve set up the framework, now what about the interior?

Images

Blog posts don’t only contain text. Great posts also include images to break up a visual wall of text and add interest for the readers. Google can’t really see images, so you have to add alt text to tell it what it’s seeing. You can also use the title element for an image so when a user places their mouse over it more information appears about the image. This is helpful for Google and the user. In addition, captions are a great way to use your keywords as well as offer more information about the image. Finally, with images, don’t forget to use a filename that is descriptive and contains your keywords.

Content

Google likes posts that reference other posts on the site, as long as they have a logical reference point. Use your keywords as an anchor text to link another post on your site. An easy way to do this is to create a series of posts on the same subject, then daisy chain the links between all of them. It shows authority over the subject, since you obviously have a lot to say about it, and it organises a way for readers to follow your thread.

Google likes authority sites, those sites that have many different posts on the same subject. It proves knowledge, which Google values when assigning rank. If you structure your content this way, every post you write will have a great opportunity to rank. Just remember to write for the reader and structure it properly for Google.

Jim Stewart, CEO of BloggersSEO, is a recognised digital marketing expert. Jim is ProBlogger’s SEO expert and will share his vast SEO knowledge to equip you with the systems and skills to optimise and monetise your blog using tried and tested techniques. What Jim doesn’t know about SEO and blogging isn’t worth knowing.

About Jim Stewart
Jim Stewart, CEO of BloggersSEO, is a recognised digital marketing expert. Jim is ProBlogger’s SEO expert and will share his vast SEO knowledge to equip you with the systems and skills to optimise and monetise your blog using tried and tested techniques. What Jim doesn’t know about SEO and blogging isn’t worth knowing.
Comments
  1. Great post Jim, it’s about time we all get back to the basics of blogging SEO! =)

    • Writing keyword content is the surest way to get more traffic from Google.

      But it’s also important to giving a pleasant reading experience to your audience. If all you do is keyword stuffing, it’s not gonna help.

      Focus on both crawlers and readers can do the trick.

      Focusing on mastering the on page SEO skills can help you immensely. Most people repeat the same keywords instead of targeting the LSI keywords within their content while doing on page SEO. That’s why most pages won’t get better rankings.

    • Great post Jim,

      I use exactly the same SEO strategy to rank all my articles in Google. You may consider adding an embed like a youtube video, slide share or even a tweet. Theu add more juice to SEO.

      Cheers

  2. Yeah… SEO really started from the post itself. Everything has to be taken care of while writing a post for SEO. Thanks for this post

  3. Many thanks to Jim Stewart for this post!
    Although it can be hard and exhausting sometimes, writing great, original content is always the right choice. Let’s not forget, in the age of excellence, people absorb new information significantly fast. They are in a constant need of new, valuable information to learn and apply in practice. From what I’ve learned so far, in some cases writing well about a problem itself sparks new ideas for readers, maybe provides answers or somehow helps them find solution to a problem.
    People love to read because it makes them grow intellectually. Bloggers should aim for satisfying these growth needs simply by providing valuable posts with Google ranking in mind :)

    Again, very good and helpful insights.
    Best wishes!

  4. Hey Jim,

    When it comes to select keywords, we should try always to select appropriate keywords for match up because it is considered as primary strategy for SEO in order to business growth through online visibility. Definitely, I’m agree with you, we should use long tail keywords for better result in SEO. In this era, appropriate images for our blog also play crucial role to attract our readers and have potential for better optimization in google. Eventually, thanks for sharing your worthy thought with us.

    With best wishes,

    Amar kumar

  5. This post of yours has covered everything from scratch about how a beginner blogger or someone who’s well past the novice stage should proceed towards creating blog posts. But for a blogger to develop traffic to his website, is it useful to go for off-page submissions similar to those that are done as a part of SEO activities for online business development?

    • Interesting site Paulin! Don’t think about backlinks think about audience building. A by product of building your audience is that it builds backlinks.

    • Hi Paulin, I agree with Jim. It is very true that if a blogger focuses on building genuine readerships, the backlinks will definitely follow. Moreover, the “link building” is sort of a gone concept. Now engagement is the keyword that we all must focus on. Bloggers need to be more reader and community oriented rather than search engine oriented.

      At TechWelkin, whenever we have tried aggressive link building in last 2-3 years, the results have not been great. Whereas, content-centric approaches have worked much better.

  6. Great tips. I love the Yoast plugin which I’ve found is the best for optimising blogs. It’s important to guest post too to boost SEO. Thanks for this.

  7. LOVE the SEO help!! That is my main purpose for blogging at work. Thanks Jim!

  8. Jim,

    I was always confused when detailed blogs would link back to other posts on the same site. I didn’t know this was one way to show authority – thanks for the clarification.

  9. Hi
    Very informative blog. Thanks for sharing.

  10. Thanks for the wonderful Article! I would like to add one more factor which is blog Images that too plays crucial role in ranking. Adding Alt tag to your images will benefit you to improve your ranking.

  11. Many thanks to Jim Stewart for this post!
    Although it can be hard and exhausting sometimes, writing great, original content is always the right choice. Let’s not forget, in the age of excellence, people absorb new information significantly fast. They are in a constant need of new, valuable information to learn and
    Thank you very much for that great article. Good Content – that is what blogging is all about. Google likes it and our readers too.

    Thank you for your description and your work.

    Silke

  12. Great Post Jim,

    You have clearly mentioned some rock solid tips to increase a blog post ranking in Search Engine. This article will surely help newbie bloggers to rank their posts in SERP. Great Job.

  13. Great post! I am all about those keywords AND making content easy for people to scan and read. I often forget to link my blog content for more SEO juice so thanks for the reminder!

  14. H1, H2 tags plays important role in letting search engine know that these are the top most topic or highlights of the post or articles. They set the theme of post!

  15. The page title is the first thing your readers see, usually in a link that has been shared or in the search results. More importantly, it’s the first thing that Google will see.

    I Like this reality, this words make me understand how to SEO, thank you

  16. Jim, you made some really valid points

    But i am really confused as i have been following these guidelines and still not able to get ranked.

    I think no one can rank without solid backlink strategy

  17. writing great, original content is always the right choice. it hard but safe way

  18. Thanks for the great info!

    How do you feel about plugins (like Yoast someone mentioned above) to help guide you as you optimize your post? One thing that I’m not sure about with those plugins is their inability to recognize variations of a word, for exampled “Organized” was my keyword, but it won’t recognize “organize” or “organization”. Is that the same way Google will do it?

  19. Yeah, It’s necessary to write SEO optimized article to get rank, but, If the website is new with no backlinks, is nearly impossible to rank in first page. Thank You

  20. Great post overall. Yes, a title that contains your main keyword with catchy words always force users to click.. heading and images make the post more attractive and users feel better while reading.

  21. Hey Jim Stewart,

    Thanks so much for opening my mind on this SEO tips. I have seen this kind of technique working very nice and it did well in one of my blog post. Keyword is the big deal when it comes to ranking and i imposed this technique and my post is now ranking on 1st page of google in two keywords i was implementing for ranking.

    One thing is, content is always more important the rest will work much better. right now all i think about is building an audience fro my contents and i believe the rest will follow as long as more audience comes to see what i have published.

    Thanks for the tips.

  22. I’ve got a question about image text. When renaming it wit keywords, Is it better to hyphenate the title of the picture, or leave it as regular text? For example, on my blog, I write about DIY. Should I name my pictures “how to paint a dresser” or “how-to-paint-a-dresser”? Does one structure do better than the other? I know that when people pin it, you’ve got to have nice alt text included in paragraph form, otherwise the title is pinned and hyphenated, which doesn’t look attractive on Pinterest. Would love your thoughts on this!

  23. Very informative post. I have two queations, what do you mean by daisy link? I’ve wrtiten several posts about Facebook and wondering if this is something I should do. Also, when it comes to images, I’ve heard different things about alt texts….should it be a word that tells Google what the image actually is? For example, a beach…should the alt text say beach. Or, can you use your tags as alt text for the images?

    • If a vision impaired person was using a screen reader to read your post, tell them about the image in the context of the post. If you can use your keywords, bonus!

  24. Great tips, Jim! This validates that I do indeed need to be linking to other content on my site in each blog post. I’ve heard that can look spammy in the eyes of Google. How many internal links should ideally be included in a 400-500 word blog post?
    Thanks!
    Angela

  25. However many links it needs. The only guideline I would use is don’t make it too hard to understand because it’s full of links. If it makes sense for the user do it.

  26. Dear Jim , Posts looks comprehensive and well structured :)

    Thank you

  27. Great article Jim. I wrote down some tips from your article that I need to improve. Content is everything but needs to be optimized yes.
    I also get in doubt about internal links to other articles, and if we can use it without problems.
    Thank you! Maria.

  28. Hey, Jim!

    I actually follow much. Yes, much.

    But not exactly like how you detailed. :)

    I can certainly tell that these are too basics of the things to consider while writing but are often neglected.

    Because we all believe that these are too easy and we will do.

    But in the reality, we don’t put many efforts on these too-essential ingredients to write better and gain the rankings.

    So, great tips you shared with us!

    ~ Adeel

  29. All the tips are great Jim! As i am new in blog writing it helped me a lot to write and decorate my content with images. I wrote it down as you said to add a title with the picture as i was using it without any heading. i had some queries but i found my answers it in others comments. Thank you so much

  30. Hi Jim, I appreciate your great post. Its well described and I guess it will help everyone who wants to get organic traffic. I have written a similar post last year and found your post much informative. Thanks again.

  31. I already did all these things to structure my blog as well as blog posts. Thanks for revision. Appreciate your writing about blog structuring.

  32. Jim,
    Thank you so much for the great article! I’m very new to blogging (1 month right now) and I’m in the very frustrating boat of trying to figure out how to make my articles from my website more prominent in Google searches. I have two questions:
    1. How many tags do you use on an article? I read 4-6 is good, but I don’t want to be over tagging and turning Google against me.
    2. Yesterday, I went to look at the Google webmaster tools for my site, and it was only showing 9 of my 30+ posts! I have no idea what to do! I started looking at sitemaps and that is WAY beyond my skills (and possibly beyond even my comprehension). Do you have any thoughts about what I can do to get my content more noticed? (I’m doing Yoast like it’s my new religion.)
    Any and all help is appreciated!

  33. Thanks so much for this post. It’s super useful! I have been blogging for 2 years now, but only recently have I started to properly get my head around SEO – there is so much to learn! One thing I am learning that helps (particularly in food blogging) is to find out what people are actually searching for and cross reference this with how much competition there is for those search terms (e.g. for me if BBC food, Jamie Oliver and Nigella et al. have covered it then it will be tough to get on the first page for that search) Finding popular searches that aren’t well covered by the big hitters is the gold dust – I am finding it surprisingly easy to get on page 1 when I do this!

  34. My biggest difficulty is the content, I take a week to create an article of 800 words

  35. Hey, Jim!very helpful for me but i’m very lazy about creating content what should i do?

  36. kalaivani says: 02/07/2018 at 10:32 pm

    Hi Jim,
    Good and interesting blog to read.I got the useful information what I needed.Thanks!

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