SEO for bloggers.

W ant the best guide to SEO for bloggers and beginners on the internet?

Not your average run-of-the-mill guide to SEO for bloggers. Rather – everything you need to know in today’s SEO landscape to reach the top of Google rankings.

We’ve got you covered.

You’ll get practical examples of strategies we’ve tested ourselves. And blog SEO tips and best practices that stand the test of time.

So, let’s dive in!

Fundamentals of SEO For Bloggers

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s where you optimize your blog content and website in general so that search engines like Google show it at the top of search rankings for your target keywords.

Pro Tip: If you want to excel in SEO, make the right website for the right people.

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If you want to optimize your blog posts to rank in search results, you need to start writing content that matches what people are searching for.

This is known as “search intent.”

If you satisfy the intent of the searcher, then you’ve done your job as a blogger.

Why Is Blog SEO So Important?

If you want to get your site ranked on the first page of Google and other search engines, then you need to learn SEO.

Optimizing your website for search engines is the best way to grow your traffic exponentially over time.

Social media or paid ads might spike traffic for a day or send you visitors as long as you keep paying. However, learning SEO is a much more profitable investment that will continue to pay off over time.

So, where’s the best place to start?

On-page SEO is the best way to begin. It’s everything you optimize on your own site to rank in search results. And in this chapter, we will talk about its implementation.

Back in the early days of search engines, on-page optimization was all about stuffing as many keywords as possible into your content. But as search engine algorithms have evolved, these practices have mostly ended, because they hurt more than help.

Now, it’s all about understanding user behavior and engagement.

Let’s move on to the on-page SEO for Bloggers Checklist.

(Oh, and if you ever feel lost – scroll down to the bottom of the page to refresh your memory on terms, etc., we made sure to include!)

On-Page SEO for Bloggers: Best Practices Checklist

Before you hit that publish button, make sure that you check everything off the list.

1. Research Keywords for Every Blog Post

If you don’t already have a blog post idea, you’ll need to do some keyword research. This will help you understand what people search for on Google relating to your site’s topic.

Find keywords that have high volume and are easy to rank.

You also need to assess the intent of the keyword so that it’s easy for you to write content that will satisfy the searcher.

For instance, if you see a keyword for a free tool and notice that all the top-ranking pages are pages with a free tool, sitting down to write a blog post won’t cut it. Google believes searchers of the term want to access a tool, so unless you have one on your own site, you won’t rank.

Simply put, keyword research is the first and most important part of your SEO strategy that you can’t ignore. We will talk about keyword research below – you can click here to skip ahead to the keyword research section.

2. Optimize Your Blog Title, Subheadings, & Meta Description

Now that you have your keywords, you need to use them in your title, subheadings, and throughout the content of your article.

You don’t need to forcefully use the keywords in your content. Use them naturally and make sure that you don’t stuff keywords where it doesn’t make sense or sound good. Always remember that you are writing for the reader first, then Google.

The only meta tags you need to worry about are meta titles and meta descriptions.  You should use your keywords in both of these. It’s easy to do this if you’re using the SEO plugin All in One SEO (AIOSEO).

With AIOSEO, you can easily set the page title and meta description manually or use the pre-made tags with different variables.

use aioseo to set page title and meta description

There’s also a snippet preview so you can see how your post title and meta description will look in search results.

These are important because they can help improve your SEO thanks to better CTR (click-through rate), which is an important ranking factor.

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So, you need to make sure you get it right.

3. Remember That Readable URLs Help With SEO

This is an important aspect of SEO for bloggers, especially. You would never want your blog post’s URLs to look like this:

www.example.com/2020/post318e7a349f6

Instead, you should make your URLs user-friendly so they look more like this:

www.example.com/seo-guide/

The URL should be able to show what the content is all about and give a basic idea about the topic.

To ensure that your URLs are proper in WordPress, you can log in to your dashboard and click on Settings » Permalinks. Then select “Post Name,” as seen in the screenshot below.

permalinks - seo guide

4. Add Rich Media to Your Content

Adding images and videos to your content will help engage your visitors, reduce your bounce rate, and increase your average visit duration. This sends good signals to Google which helps in getting your content ranked.

Be sure that you add alt text to your images. Adding alt text to your images helps Google to understand what the image is all about. It also helps get your images listed on Google Image search, which can potentially bring in traffic.

Always optimize your image using TinyPNG so that it doesn’t take too long to load.

5. Link to Other Blog Posts on Your Site

Internal links are a perfect way to drive traffic from one page to another. It increases the visitor’s stay time on your site, which is what you want as a website owner.

From the SEO perspective, properly placed internal links help the Google bot understand your site structure, what it’s about, and which pages are most important.

Ideally, each post shouldn’t take more than two clicks to reach from your home page.

To make the internal linking process easier, you can use AIOSEO’s Link Assistant add-on. It will automatically generate a link report for your site, including linking opportunities and orphaned posts (pages with no links).

aioseo internal link assistant

You can add the link suggestions to your content in one 1-click. No need to edit individual posts.

6. Ensure Your Site Is Mobile Optimized

Almost 60% of searches come from mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, so having a very good and fast mobile version of your site is important.

Google looks at the mobile version of your site when deciding how to rank it in search results, even for searches performed on a desktop. This is called “mobile-first indexing.”

So, if your mobile version isn’t fast enough, you won’t rank well, even if most of the traffic on your site is from people on desktops. That’s why it’s so important to have a responsive design that looks good on any theme and to test your website speed to see if it’s fast enough.

7. Optimize Your Content for Voice Search

Voice search has gone up by 35x since 2008, and 41% of the adults now perform at least one voice search per day. Also, 20% of all mobile searches are done through voice.

That’s why it’s smart to optimize your content for voice searches, too.

In order for your result to pop up during a voice search, you need to rank in the top 3 results.

It also increases your chances if your content is in the featured snippet, as 4 out of 10 voice search results come from featured snippets.

It helps to include a question and an answer in your content. Adding a “Frequently Asked Questions” section in your content can help even more.

8. Try to Get Your Content In Featured Snippets

Featured snippets, also known as “position 0”, are another factor that you should try to optimize for when possible.

These are the boxes that show up at the top of search results:

According to Ahrefs, 13% of all search results now show featured snippets. This makes it very important to optimize your content for them.

featured snippets seo

So, how does your content show up in the featured snippets?

First, you need to get your content ranked on the first page. You can optimize your content and formatting from there to get the snippet.

Here are some types of content that gets featured in the featured snippets:

  1. “How to”
  2. “Best of”
  3. “Who is”
  4. “What is”
  5. “Why is”

Basically, question-related types of blog posts have a higher chance of getting into the featured snippet.

You can read this guide on how to optimize content for featured snippets for more details and tips.

Content Marketing and SEO for Bloggers

Are you learning SEO for bloggers as a part of your content marketing strategy?

This is something that has actually bugged me for a long time. Sometimes, people think that content marketing and SEO are opposed to each other or that SEO is something nefarious while content marketing is pure.

We believe that content marketing and SEO go hand in hand and complement each other.

One can’t succeed without the other.

Imagine if you wrote an excellent piece of content that’s filled with visuals and great information, but you don’t optimize it for search engines.

Would anyone be able to find it?

Similarly, you perfectly optimize a page for search engines, but it’s packed with content that no one would read. Do you think it would rank for long?

That’s why you must create unique and compelling content and optimize it for search engines for maximum effect.

This helps in getting more backlinks and increases the reach of your content.

Effective Types of Content

First and foremost, your content should be unique and compelling. It should be able to satisfy the reader’s intent.

There are a few types of content that get more traction than others. We have covered this in great detail in our how to get backlinks guide

We will briefly touch upon these in this article.

  1. Research-Based Content with Original Data
  2. List Posts and Tutorials
  3. In-Depth Guides
  4. Visual Posts: Infographics, Images, Videos, etc.

These are some of the content that gets the most backlinks and engagement. You should try to develop ideas that fall into one of the above-mentioned content types.

For more tips and ideas, see our guide to types of blog posts that work for any niche.

What Is the Ideal Length of a Content Piece?

The ideal length of a blog post depends on how many words it takes for you to get the message through. Remember that your SEO writing is still for the user, then search engines.

Since we can’t outright ignore Google and other search engines, we need to understand how they behave regarding content length.

According to a study by Can I Rank, the word count of blog posts that were ranked in the top 3 was more than 1000. In this sense, there is a better chance of ranking in the top 3 if your content has more than 1000 words.

content length study - seo

But keep in mind that your 1000 words mean anything if your content isn’t good enough and doesn’t get the message through.

Back to the top

How to Do Keyword Research

You can’t write an optimized post without first doing proper keyword research.

To be fair, we can’t cover everything about keyword research in this guide. It’s too big of a topic and requires a separate guide to cover every aspect of it.

But we will try our best to explain how to do keyword research in this chapter.

Keyword Research the Easy Way

First, you need to get some broad topic ideas. You can see our list of new blog post ideas to get started. From there, you can develop a list of topics to write and start researching.

There are also lots of SEO tools out there with advanced features to help you rank is search results. But I’ll show you a free and easy way to do some basic keyword research.

Once you have your topic ideas, put your topic into Google Search, and you will see Google suggesting a few related keywords.

Something like this.

search suggestions by google - keyword research seo

These suggested keywords are important because Google wouldn’t show them if they weren’t being searched often.

Try using different variations of keywords and list the keyword suggestions that come up.

You may have also noticed the “Searches related to…” box at the bottom of the results page. They look something like this:

related searches by google - keyword research

Add these to your keywords list, too. And to further increase your keyword list, you can click on one of the “searches related to” keywords and then this will take you to the results of the keyword you just clicked. Scroll down the bottom of the page, and this will give you a list of its related keywords.

Once you finish all of this, you will have your extensive list of keywords. So, what do you do with the keywords you found? How do you shortlist them?

How to Choose the Right Keyword

Apart from your own judgment, you can also consider the following factors to help you rank.

Google Keyword Planner and other SEO tools can help you look up these stats.

  1. Search volume: When you are shortlisting your keywords, you need to see if they have a decent volume. There is a chance to get a lot of traffic if your keyword has a high search volume.
  2. Keyword Difficulty: Target low competition first. They will help you get ranked faster.
  3. Keyword Trend: Another good way to decide whether the keyword you have chosen is good or not. Go to Google Trends and enter your keyword. Google Trends will show if your keyword is trending or not. If the graph is high, that means you have made the right choice.

Semantic Keywords

Semantic Keywords are those keywords that are related to your primary keyword. They are also called LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords.

You can use these keywords in your content to make it more complete. To find LSI keywords, you can use the free WPBeginner Keyword Generator Tool. Simply enter your main keyword idea and you’ll get a bunch of related keywords for your blog post.

Find LSI keywords with WPBeginner's Keyword Generator

Quick Note: Never stuff your blog with keywords so that it sounds unnatural and forced. You will be inviting Google to strike you hard and penalize your site. This website optimization technique is old and dated, don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise.

Now, let’s move on to the next chapter, link building!

Back to the top

Link building is one of the most important factors of SEO for bloggers. It is the process of getting links from other websites to increase your website’s authority.

These links acts as votes and the more you have them, the more authority your site gets.

But there are a few things you need to know if you want to learn how to differentiate between a good and a bad backlink.

A good quality backlink should…

  1. Come from high authority websites
  2. Have a relevant anchor text to your keyword
  3. Be on relevant websites
  4. Have the “do-follow” attribute (more on this below)
  5. Come in from a unique referring domain

We have a detailed guide on link building that goes into much more detail on all of these. But here, I’ll give you a brief overview.

Why is Link Building Important?

Google has officially stated that backlinks are among their top 3 ranking factors. While you’ll likely get some backlinks naturally if you publish great content, purposefully building backlinks can help your traffic grow much faster.

Do-Follow Links and No-Follow Links

There are two types of external backlinks: do-follow and no-follow. When you’re building links, you need to make sure that you get “do-follow” as they are the ones that help your rankings.

No-follow links don’t pass on any authority, because the publisher is basically telling Google that they want to link to this page without vouching for the site or its quality.

Luckily, most of the links you get from are do-follow unless you get them from comments sections, profile links, press release, or paid advertisements.

If you manage to get high number of quality backlinks then there is a high chance of you ranking in the SERPS.

How to Build Quality Links

In this section, we will be talking about some popular ways you can use to build quality backlinks. For more detail see our ultimate guide to link building.

1. Resource Pages Link Building

The first way is to find websites that list useful resources. Once you have found them, reach out to them asking them to link to your content. The more resourceful your content is, the more chances it has of getting a link.

Here are some search operators you can use in Google to find resource page link building opportunities:

  1. “Keyword” + inurl:links
  2. “Keyword” + inurl:resources
  3. “Keyword” + inurl:useful-resources
  4. “Keyword” + “helpful resources”
  5. “Keyword” + “useful resources”
  6. “Keyword” + “useful links”

Make a list of potential sites, and then follow up and ask them to link to your best content.

2. Link Roundups

Websites regularly link out to other valuable websites, they call this link roundups because they do it either monthly or weekly.

All you have to do is reach out to them and ask them to include your link in the next round up.

If your content is good enough, you will get a backlink in their roundups.

3. HARO Interview Link Building

HARO stands for “help a reporter out”.

It’s a platform that lets journalists send pitches to everyone who has registered on Haro. There are a lot of big publications that send their pitches. You will get these pitches in your email, you can respond to the pitches you feel qualified to answer. If your pitch is accepted you will be notified and will get a contextual link from your website.

4. Spying on your Competition

You can check out other blogs in the same niche as yours, and get links from the sites they are getting links from. All you have to do is create content that’s better and then ask those sites to link to your content instead.


Basic SEO Terminology

Just to ensure you have everything you need all in one place – we thought to include this section!

There may have been some terms that had you scratching your head.

Here are few terms that you need to be aware of when learning SEO for bloggers.

  • On-page SEO is everything that you do on your website, from using certain words in your content to technical aspects like the way your site is coded.
  • Off-page SEO is everything you do to promote your website and improve its authority off your site, like getting backlinks from other authority websites.
  • Backlinks act like votes that you get from other websites. Google considers these as proof that your content is good enough to be ranked on the top. The more quality backlinks you have the easier it will be for you to rank.
  • Black Hat SEO are practices that violate Google’s policies and can get your site penalized. Black Hat SEO may bring you short-term success, but you won’t stay at the top for long. Sooner rather than later, you will be sacked by Google. We strongly advise against this.
  • White Hat SEO is the opposite of black hat SEO. In other words, it’s SEO done the right way. Stick to this if you’re in for the long run!

These should help you get going for now.

Back to the top

How Search Engines Work

Before we get to the part where we explain how you can do SEO to rank high on search engines, we need you to understand how search engines work.

In this section. we will also talk about how people use search engines, how it works, ranking factors, algorithms and different features of search engine results pages (SERPs).

The process is simpler than you might think. Search engines have bots, also called spiders, that crawl the contents of a web page. After it’s done crawling, Google uses that information and runs it through their secret algorithms to decide where to rank it in the search engine results pages.

If you optimize your blog for search engines correctly, the bots will index your page on the relevant keyword that you want to target.

But this also depends on the various algorithms of Google and other search engines, which we will talk about in detail below.

Search Engine Ranking Factors

Did you know that there are over 200 different things that Google looks at to determine how to rank each web page? These are called “ranking factors”.

Don’t worry, we aren’t going to go through all 200 of them here!

Not all of them are very important or require your attention. I’ll just give you some SEO tips for bloggers who want to optimize for the most important ranking factors.

Here are the most important:

  1. Referring domains
  2. Organic click-through-rate
  3. Domain authority
  4. Domain relevancy
  5. Mobile usability
  6. Dwell time
  7. Total number of backlinks
  8. Content quality

These are in no particular order, by the way.

Here’s a bit more info about what they all mean:

Referring domains are other websites that link to your website. If you have high authority domains linking out to you, then this will not only increase your website’s authority but it will also give you a chance to rank higher on Google.

Organic click-through rate (CTR) is defined as the number of times the searcher clicks on your page after searching for a keyword. If you have a high CTR then you have a good chance of staying on the position you initially ranked for, and even moving up in rankings.

Domain authority is the authority of your domain which you built over time by getting quality backlinks and publishing high-quality content that’s optimized for search.

Domain relevancy means that your domain should have content related to your main topic. For example, if you’re travel blogging, it will be easier for you to rank on travel-related topics. But then, if you decide to create content around tech news or recipes, it will be much harder to rank those in search results.

Mobile usability refers to how easy it is to use your site on mobile devices like tablets and smartphones. It helps to improve the load time of your blog so that it loads faster. You also need to work on the overall user experience (UX) to make your blog easy to navigate.

Dwell time is the time a visitor spends on your website. Let’s say that your blog is ranked at the 4th of the first page and a visitor clicks through to your blog. Your visitor really likes the content and spends time going through the information you have on your blog. Your content has satisfied the user’s intent and he leaves your site without going back to the search results and clicking on a different link. Google will take note of this and might give you a bump in your position.

Total number of backlinks is the number of links to your website from other sites around the web.

Content quality goes without saying! The better the content you create, the longer readers will stay on your page, and the better your chances of getting good links.

This is the foundation of SEO for bloggers.

Search Engine Algorithm Updates

Search engines, more specifically Google, make a lot of updates to their algorithms to improve their search results. You will hear the people often talk about how a certain Google update made them gain or lose their rankings.

But generally, if you are doing everything right and following the basic Google guidelines, then you don’t have anything to worry about.

Our advice to you once you start doing SEO is that there will be times that you will be greatly rewarded after a Google update. Then there will also be a time when you might lose your rankings even though you were doing everything right.

At times like these, be patient and keep doing what is right and satisfy your visitor’s intent with good compelling content. If you stick to that, you’ll be rewarded.

Features of Search Engine Results Pages

Search engine results pages (SERPs) don’t only include lists of URLs. Google has added a lot of features to them over time.

You may have noticed things like featured boxes, ads, image carousels, and other features.

These are some of the most common rich snippets you’ll see in the SERP:

  1. Featured snippet
  2. Answer box
  3. Carousel (images, videos, products)
  4. Image pack
  5. Map pack
  6. Sponsored features (Google Ads, flights, shop on Google)
  7. Knowledge graph
  8. Top stories
  9. Events
  10. Sitelinks

The SERP feature you should target is the featured snippet. If you manage to get your site in the featured snippet, you will get a huge organic traffic boost.

Back to the top

SEO For Bloggers In Closing

We hope that our SEO for bloggers and beginners guide helped you get started in understanding search engine optimization.

Next, you might want to check out our guide on getting more traffic to your blog, or how to get started with email marketing so you can convert those visitors into subscribers.

If you any questions or feedback, then do let us know in the comments!

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  1. Great article with excellent idea!Thank you for such a valuable article. I really appreciate for this great information.

  2. DATADOT SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS on August 23, 2019

    Amazing blog! I enjoyed it.

  3. sri lakshmi on August 26, 2019

    Great Article for blog starters .Thanks for sharing

  4. Great article on blogs.Thanks for sharing info.It is really helpfull.

  5. Shristi Patni on August 30, 2019

    If you want to get your site ranked on the first page of Google and other search engines, then you need to learn SEO. its really good information new learner .

  6. Geat tips! thanks for the share

  7. Great work its very informative information for seo beginners

  8. Thanks for sharing wonderful information.

  9. Thanks for sharing useful in formation.

  10. Wow! Really glad I found your blog!

  11. sakshi mehra on October 23, 2019

    This article has proved to be a reality check for someone like who wishes to pursue a career in SEO. I will say that SEO is tricky and nobody really knows the correct and absolute way of doing it, but there is scope to learn by oneself and monitor the results. If the results are positive, it means you are on the right track.

    Thank You. Best Wishes.

    1. Thanks, Sakshi!

  12. Thats a great content on SEO based Blogging..This will really help new bloggers..

    1. Thanks, Eddy!

  13. Yoga Essence Rishikesh on November 3, 2019

    Thank you for sharing the information with us . Very nice article.

    1. Glad you found it helpful!

  14. Excellent article for beginners! I loved the way it starts from fundamentals to quality link building. Beginners can learn and explore SEO after this guidance.

    1. Thanks, Sagana, glad you found it useful!

  15. Excellent information for a beginner. I learnt a lot. Thank you.
    I have a query. In the niche I want to work, first 9 or 10 searches comes as Ad by google. How do we compete in such scenario?

  16. Thank you for sharing!

  17. rajeshwari on July 8, 2020

    This article is nice and useful for SEO beginners.

  18. Sherlynn A. Muckelroy on July 23, 2020

    My stars and garters! This is A LOT of information for someone like me who wants to start their first blog. I am no spring chicken, nor am I SEO savvy, but now I know where to come to learn all about the topic. Baby steps. Thank you for detailing each step so an aging hip-chick like me can understand the lingo. WHEW! I’m exhausted just thinking about it, but upward and onward, I say.

  19. Syarif Sabirin on August 23, 2020

    Hi, in seo technique, will long articles matter in terms of seo. For example, I create articles with a word length of up to 3000 words in my posts.

    1. Hey Syarif,

      Great question! Check out our article called How Long Should a Blog Post Be? to find out how word length affects your site’s SEO.

      1. This helped me so much! It was the basis for my newest article, and I gave you a link back as my thanks. Thanks a ton!Amazing content. Very useful

  20. This article is very informative, updated and transparent.
    What a useful information provided by this blog! It’s remarkable. Thanks for helping me out

    1. Glad you found it useful, Debora!

  21. Ambiance fly on September 2, 2021

    This is very interesting i want to try this thank you very much to share

  22. Darpan barje on December 20, 2021

    Thank you for sharing great knowledge.

  23. Ambiance fly on January 5, 2022

    Awesome blog i am loving with this article

  24. Good

  25. these are very useful tips to rank website on SERP. Thanks for sharing the informative content.

  26. salmanbinjaffar on February 18, 2022

    I would like to say that SEO is little bit tricky and nobody really knows the correct and absolute way of doing it, but there is scope to learn by oneself and monitor the results. If the results are positive, it means you are on the right track.

  27. I am using the Yoast SEO pack right now. I just switched to WordPress, so I am still learning the ropes of all the plug-ins.! Thanks for all of these posts. It’s really helpful.

    Ravi from India

  28. THE BLOG IS VERY MUCH INFORMATIVE AND AMAZING THANKS FOR THESE BLOG

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