The rule of thumb in publishing blog posts: write something that people on the internet need (and in high quality). That’s the surest way to having a successful blog.

Search engine optimization (SEO) involves the use of writing techniques and other optimization strategies so that your article will appear on top of search results.

It is essential. However, it is worth nothing that SEO is constantly evolving. Search engines such as Google has the habit of changing their algorithms to which search results rely on what to show.

Therefore, you could fully optimize your content now but the strategy that you’ve applied might no longer work a year later.

One of the apparent reasons are bloggers, who after knowing how the new change in the algorithm works, would spam the system – and search engines would make changes.

Anyway, here are some strategies that should work to optimize your articles for high search rank. It’s time to learn the mind-blowing facts on how SEO works.

Blog Title and Keywords

Blog title and keywords are two of the most important aspects to ensure your blog will find success, not just on SEO.

The title is the first thing that visitors would look at and is a deciding factor whether they are going to read the article or not. This should provide specificity and emotion. A RankMath article disclosed that the article should feel like it was written for the reader and power words (or words that trigger a psychological or emotional response) should be present.

Here are some examples:

• 10 Essential Parts of a Blog Post That Every Article of Your Blog Should Have
• How to Maintain Visitor Enthusiasm on Your Website
• First Impression vs. Long-Term: Learn the Fascinating Gameplan for Your Entire Blog

Keyword research refers to the finding out what search terms your audience uses when searching. This brings clarity to search engines and avoid mismatch with search intents.

There are many keyword research tools that offers simple and straightforward suggestions based on their analysis of huge data. These includes Google Keyword Planner, Semrush, and Ubersuggest.

Likewise, study how high-ranking websites on a similar niche to yours do their title and keywords.

Formatting

Ensure that your article are properly formatted both for visitor-experience and SEO. This includes proper tagging: Use H1 only for post’s main title, while use H2 H3 H4 tags for subheadings logically.

Use short paragraphs, as these are more easily digestible rather than a very long paragraph. Include bullet and numbered lists.

The use of table of contents for long articles is essential. Moreover, compress images and provide alt text.

Page Speed

Page load speed refers to the time it takes for a page on your website to load. Not only does a website that loads quickly provides a good impression to visitors, but it is also an advantage to ranking higher on search results.

Google’s core philosophy has always been that relevance is most important – though page speed does not necessarily mean high quality, helpful content – it provides good experience to readers. And good page experience is being rewarded by Google algorithm.

Install a SEO Plugin

Installing a SEO plugin is a must-do for every blogger using the WP platform. Plugins provides the essentials, and easy to fill-in information (meta titles, descriptions) to ranking on search results. Popular plugins are: Yoast, Rank Math, and All in One SEO.

SEO plugins provide ease-of-use, streamlined optimization, and time-saving automation to improve the visibility of your website on search rankings.

These also shows how to further improve your article, some provides a percentage or color and details the suggestions for enhancement.

Promote on Social Media

Aside from focusing on optimizing each article for search results, you should promote your articles on social media. Top social media to share your articles are Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok.

Social media provides the audience, as millions to billions of people would regularly log in there to connect with loved ones or read news updates. Target is to find individuals on that social network who are interested to reading your contents.

This can spark a traffic for your website, and this helps provide a signal to search engines that your contents are worthy to rank high on their website.

Final Thoughts

Search engine optimization continues to evolve as computer engineers keep on upgrading the program. While many of what search engines have been looking for contents to rank high still works (quality, user-experience which may never change), there have been changes in use of keywords and more.

It is best to focus on writing high quality contents, apply keyword research, and more. Follow directions and fill-in the necessary information required by your SEO plugin.

Never over-optimize. Over-optimizing has been the norm in the past decade, only to be penalized by search engines for spam.