In the first post of the "How To Write SEO Friendly POSTS In 2020" mini-series, I talked mainly about traffic and how important it is to generate it, but I also explained how it ultimately has an impact in three different ways. I always try to lay out everything in an easy to read & understand format, so everyone easily can implement the techniques and what I share into their future posts. In this article, things will most likely be more complex, but I will do my best to keep it as simple as possible.
How To Write SEO Friendly Posts In 2020
Blogs are powerful tools for individuals and companies looking to increase their online visibility, but posts on Hive, LEOFinance and on any of the other communities are identical in many ways. They provide a platform to demonstrate expertise and showcase a passion. Your profile is your blog.
You obviously want traffic directly on the content you publish, but traffic to your profile is another good way of growing your audience, making connections and a superb way of generating extra traffic towards the entire platform. You take people by the hand and walk them all the way to the door.
- At the door, it's up to them to walk in- or walk away.
In order to get the most traffic and maximize visibility, a variety of search engine optimization tactics must be used before you publish content. While your personal goal might be to earn and grow your stake, the overall goal should be to offer something that both users and search engines will enjoy.
Optimize Your Posts
The first step when creating content is to actually have an idea and after that comes a short list of other things to do. Write the article, add tags etc. Before I tell you how to optimize your posts, I will mention what people in general seems to do on Hive:
They get an idea for a post. They write the article and use a cover image from google. Often by copying the image url. They insert a handful of tags and press publish. The next few hours they sit back and wait for the rewards to come while they think of the next post to publish. Rinse and repeat.
While this might work with various results, it doesn't yield as great results as it could. In fact, not even a fraction of the results it could yield. You might not be rewarded a lot for optimizing your content in the beginning, but it does benefit the entire community and yourself in the long haul. As I want you to learn how to optimize your posts, I will obviously show you how to do it, but I will also explain why it is important. I will talk about all of these different steps in detail as we go deeper into this.
- Have an idea:
Like I said, the first step is to have an idea for a post. The next thing you should do, is to determine a purpose for the post. Yeah, a purpose. While your initial purpose might be to earn, we will think of the bigger picture from now on. You need to determine a purpose. Ask yourself questions and look at the purpose through the consumers eyes. Through your readers eyes. Will the information you share help in any way? - Find the purpose and keep that in mind throughout the whole article you write.
- Define a target audience:
Step two is more for current authors or content creators, but even newcomers will benefit from thinking about this. After step one you're ready to move on to step two. Who will read your post? - This basically means that you think of your audience, what they have read and liked previously and if you believe they will enjoy the content you're working on right now.
- Keyword research:
This is where I think that most authors on Hive gives up on optimization. As soon as you think of keywords you think it involves hours of work and that you need to be a professional. That is false.
When you have a purpose and you know who will read your posts, it's time for something that is often overlooked when it comes to SEO (search engine optimization), it's time to optimize. This is also the most essential step in the writing process. You need to find out the keywords you want to use, but also which keywords that generates the most traffic.
Google Trends is free to use.
You want to know which keywords that generates the most traffic. In order to do that you need to explore the search volume of multiple keywords. For this specific article, I might want to use the keywords SEO or Optimization.
If we search for SEO, this is what we will find:
Interest over time
Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means there was not enough data for this term.
Interest by region
See in which location your term was most popular during the specified time frame. Values are calculated on a scale from 0 to 100, where 100 is the location with the most popularity as a fraction of total searches in that location, a value of 50 indicates a location which is half as popular. A value of 0 indicates a location where there was not enough data for this term.
Let's dive straight into step number four. You have done some keyword research and you've been able to figure out some keywords you want to use. The next thing to do is to select a title that is optimized for your target keyword. This might sound difficult, but it's easier than you think. I'll give you an example:
Let's say that you're about to write a post about cooking and recipes. You have done the keyword research and you found a few really good keywords. Keywords that seemed to be very popular.
You have finally decided to use '10 Holiday Cooking Recipes' as the title for your post, as 'holiday recipes' were popular keywords. Keyword research finds that the search interest in 'cooking recipes' is lower than than the search interest for 'food recipes' though, so you should rename your title and go with '10 Holiday Food Recipes' instead.
That extra time you spend on keyword research and finding a better keyword can make a big difference in terms of visitors to your post. All due to ranking and visibility.. And the best part is that your content is the door to Hive. With convincing, quality content, people will be more interested to open that door.
However, we are not done yet.
There are several more steps, but as this has started to become rather lenghty, I will have to split this into a third part. I thought it would be enough with 2, but 5000 word long articles is not often fun to read.. Especially as it's a rather complex wall of text. Sorry about that, but it's basically inevitable.
That being said, we will wrap things up after one more thing. I just can't leave you hanging right now after talking about keywords this much. There is one more thing to do:
- Use targeted keywords.
You have done all the steps above and it's time to use targeted keywords throughout your content. This can be a little bit tricky, but it's doable for anyone.
Like I briefly mentioned in part 1, you need to be careful when using your keywords because you can be punished for over-using them. Keyword density is basically a percentage that counts the number of times you've used your keywords.
A better explanation would be:
Keyword density refers to the number of times a keyword appears on a given webpage or within a piece of content as a ratio or percentage of the overall word count. This is also sometimes referred to as keyword frequency, or the frequency with which a specific keyword appears on a webpage.
It is extremely important that the content is natural and doesn't sound contrived. Writers familiar with SEO and optimization can strategize to have a certain keyword density, but we'll save that for another time..
Anyhow, the ultimate goal is to write content that people want to read and learn from.
Next time we'll talk about: How To Structure Content To Generate Traffic.