In this
article I offer some tips for writing blog posts that are
geared up for search engine traffic, and that are written to be shared
in the social web. For the example, I will be walking through how I
create a real post for a high authority health web site.
I will also be creating a video to embed into the blog post, so I
will explain how I created the video, came up with the title for it, and
armed it for top results in the search engines.
If following along, be sure that when you create a video and article
that they are able to stand alone as you never know how someone will be
absorbing your content. It might be that they aren’t watching the video
embedded within your post at all, but stand alone on YouTube or wherever
it is that you decide to host it.
Let’s Use Google Suggest To Find A Good Topic For Our Blog Post
We’ll use the long tail we find within our post title
By default I head to Google.com to start, but if you are writing
content for a specific geographic audience like Canada for example, you
might want to go to the correct engine (
Google.ca) because there will be
some differences in the results, even if they are just subtle.
Also, you may want to disable the saving of search history for your
Google Account, or log out of Google completely, because the search
results may differ for you otherwise. We’ll be looking at top results to
do a quick glance at the competition. It’s not a huge deal but it’ll
help our testing to be a little more precise, but the truth is we are
not dealing with
exacts anyway. In case you didn’t know, Google
will tailor your results (when search history is being saved), to show
sites that you frequent most in the top results.
1) First, let’s decide on roughly what we want to talk about in our post.
In this example I am going to be providing a list and summary of
Facebook pages in the “raw food” niche. I’m not sure how many just yet,
maybe around 50, but I can work that part out later.
2) Next, let’s head to Google to see what people might be
searching for that would like to see that list. There might be some
deliberate searches for such a thing, but somehow I don’t think there
will be much. Let’s look anyway.
Well, there wasn’t a whole lot.
I did find:
“raw food facebook pages”
“raw food diet facebook”
“raw food health facebook”
“raw food on facebook”
I also discoverd that commonly people might look for Facebook pages in this way:
“{topic-name} related facebook page”
So, even though “raw food related facebook pages” isn’t rolling up,
it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t get traffic in the long or short term.
3) Finally, let’s assess the results that come up for each phrase.
For the search “raw food facebook pages” Google lists exactly what
you may (or may not) expect. It lists pages on
Facebook related to “raw
food.”
You might think this removes the need for the content developer but I
wouldn’t agree. I think that a nice list with that title will still
climb above those results. It would be human edited instead of machine
selected after all.
I looked through some of the other terms, and I
decided to go for the first one.
What I am mainly looking for when assessing the results is if anyone has used that exact phrase in the title of their content.
While I will be using “raw food facebook pages” for the article, I
will probably be using “raw food diet facebook” for the video.
Creating A Blog Post Title Using Our Chosen Google Suggest Keyphrase
Make a title worth clicking and sharing
OK, now with our chosen keyphrase in hand, let’s come up with a title.
The title is arguably the most important part of the content when it comes to getting clicks, SEO, and sharing.
It becomes the starting point, or the “advertisement” for the content
piece when the snippet is viewed in the SERPS or after being shared on
social sites like Facebook. The title also often determines what is
included in other key
SEO elements, which include the H1 tag and the
URL.
List posts are great, and they are often shared without hesitation.
Knowing that, let’s create a “list post” style title from our chosen
keyword.
Let’s go with:
“50 Impactful Raw Food Facebook Pages Worth Liking”
And for the video:
“50 Big-Wheel Raw Food Diet Facebook Pages”
Pay Attention To Some HTML Elements That Affect SEO
OK, with the title aside (an element that I find incredibly
important), let’s take a look at some other important factors for SEO.
I personally don’t like shoehorning other
keywords into the copy. If I
stumbled across some during the title research phase that would work
well for sub headings, then that’s one thing. To stress over getting a
bunch of keywords and phrases in the content, I don’t bother with that
for blog posts.
I think that the keywords happen naturally with the writing. It’s
natural to mention related words while you are writing, isn’t it?
But here is what I do pay attention to:
- Use a version of your main keyphrase in the opening or introduction
paragraph. It may also make sense in some cases to use the exact phrase
in a sub heading or paragraph deeper within the article.
- Separate sections of the article with H2 (or perhaps H3) heading tags.
- Use strong and emphasis (em) tags throughout if it makes sense to.
- Include an image within the content. The filename and alt text of the image are important.
- Don’t be afraid to include links within the article. Links to
external high authority sites, more information links, internal links,
etc.
Make The Content Scannable With Info Packed Headlines
Many people like to just scan an article rather than read it all the
way through. This might be enough for them to decide if they want to
share the content or save it to read later. Also, they just may get
enough from the headlines to know they don’t need to read that
particular section.
Having really good
headlines makes the scanning process simple. The
headlines stand out. They should define the next block of content but
still provide value on their own. Don’t be afraid to use lengthy
headlines. They don’t always have to be short and sweet. Some people
disagree with me here but I might even use a full sentence or two in a
headline.
Also, providing lots of whitespace or breaking up an article with
other elements like images and videos helps make the “job” of reading
seem less daunting. People can read lots of words fast, more than most
probably realize.
The problem is looking at a big wall or sea of text and feeling a
little anxiety about it. If it’s all broken up nicely, it makes for a
better, smoother read, and more likely for the person to stick around to
consume it.
Even one, two or there sentences in a
paragraph works.
But this of course makes it even more important to separate chunks of content with great sub headings.
Offer Lots Of Value, Lots Of Content For List Posts, And Mention Others To Increase The Possibility Of Shares, Likes, And Saves
This goes without saying by now. You need to provide the utmost value in every piece of content that you deliver.
Come at it like it’s your first day on the job and you want to impress and over deliver. Always overdeliver.
I set myself up with the task of finding 50 big-wheel or impactful
raw food Facebook pages. Why? Because people will want to save it for
later and share such a wonderful resource.
At the same time I am
mentioning (and linking to) others which would in turn might get them to link back or share the content.
The folks that you mention can get alerted in various ways including:
- Pingbacks and trackbacks – when linking from WordPress to WordPress for example
- Google Alerts – anytime a name or phrase is found in Google SERPS a person can be alerted by email or other means
- Traffic monitoring – a person may see the referral traffic in their logs or analytics from your content
- @ mentions in Tweets – I use Paper.li to curate content and the tool
auto-tweets a link to the current edition and @ mentions the featured
content providers
A Few Tips For Ranking Videos – Use A Google Suggest Low Comp Long Tail In The Title And Description And Post To YouTube
YouTube video results often show up within regular results. I find
that most people will target YouTube Suggest terms for their videos if
they target any at all. And that’s fine.
I do find there is a lot of overlap, but we can at least get some
love from the Google SERPS for our videos when using a
Google Suggest keyphrase.
Since YouTube is an authority site on the web, that is a strong
SEO factor in our favour out of the gate. So, using a low competiton term in
the title, in the description, and versions of it in the tags often
yields great ranking results, and sometimes within minutes.
I created a video the other day targeted to people looking for a
specific type of real estate property in a specific location. The video
ranked for the long tail 2 minutes later, probably sooner, it just took
me that long before I checked.
Now, it used to make me cringe at the thought of creating videos, but
I knew how important they were (and are). I played around with Animoto
but that wasn’t as impactful as I hoped. I dabbled with on-screen videos
but that’s just not my thing, something I will revisit later.
Seo Tool and Add ons
Best of luck getting your content quickly ranked in the SERPS!
