Last Updated on May 31, 2021 by Shevy
The Perfect Blog Post Template + Guide
Imagine having a blog post template and guide that you can use for writing future blog posts. Do you know that even before you begin writing a blog post, you need to conduct keyword research? I’ve seen countless of blog posts on the topic of blogging. But hardly anyone gives you a blog post template to follow.
So here I am today sharing all my knowledge about writing blog posts and all the intricacies of coming up with the best titles. You will also learn about the different things that could affect your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) rank in the search engines.
Related: 50 Blog Topics For When You Have Writers Block
Keyword Research
Keyword research is the first and most important step in writing your blog post. Especially if you want to make money with your blog. Of course you can skip this step if you are only writing about yourself. However, the key to earning an income from your blog is writing for people and solving their problems.
Related: How To Start A Successful Side Hustle Blog
How To Conduct Proper Keyword Research
For me, the best way to conduct keyword research has been to look at my competition. By competition I mean, other bloggers who are in my niche that are already ranking on Google for topics that I want to write about. This is not as easy as writing about the exact same topics that pop on the first page of Google from another blogger.
In fact, if you do not know who your competitors are there are a few ways you can find out. Also, you want to be using the right keyword research, tools which I’ll talk about a few next. If you want to learn how to do keyword research the right away and skip through all the hurdles, you can grab the blog post template here!
Related: How To Set Up Shopstyle Collective On Your Website
Keyword Research Tools
There are a lot of keyword research tools on the market and although many of them are not free, most have a forever free trial plan. The free plans are limited but I have a few favourite ones that although free, gives you a great amount of information. I´ll list the ones I use and recommend down below and give you an idea as to the type of data you can accumulate using each.
SEM RUSH
Most of you may already know this one as it is a very popular keyword research tool in the business and blogging community. With SEM Rush, you can spy on your competitors who are in your niche to see what top keywords they are ranking for. That is just one of the main things they are known for but you can see other information from the free trial. Such as their organic search traffic, organic competitors and backlinks.
Related: How To Start A Successful Side Hustle Blog
UBERSUGGEST BY NEIL PATEL
Similar to SEM Rush, you can use UberSuggest for keyword research, content ideas, website audit and backlinks. Its one of my favourite keyword research tools primarily because its free and user friendly. Neil also gives great free advice on SEO tactics as he is well known for being a “Marketing Genius.”
Those are just two of the most popular SEO tools on the market that I use for my blog posts. However, in my blog post template I introduce four others and how to use them to your advantage.
Related: How To Crush Your Blog Goals Like A Professional
Optimizing Your Images for SEO Using Keywords
When using images in your blog posts give them proper descriptions and alt tags. Alt tags tells the search engine what the photo is about so never use generic names like “photo12” or “IMG2343”. A useful alt tag and description could be: “how to start a blog on a budget”. With my keywords being “how to start a blog”.
You should always use the keyword that you are trying to rank for at least once in your alt tag and description. After uploading a photo, you want to fill out the following boxes with the same keywords you used in the blog post.
Example:
Alt: how to start a blog on a budget | starting a blog for free
Title: how to start a blog on a budget / how to start a blog for free
Description: Do you want to start a blog but you do not have the money to invest in starting one right now? Here are the 5 different ways in which you can start a blog for free and start earning money.
Related: A Day In The Life Of A Part Time Blogger
Other Tactics For Organic Growth
- Create awesome, quality, relevant and shareable content using relevant keywords.
- Write blog posts that are at least 600 words, ideally over 1000.
- Interlink your blog posts: link your current posts to older posts and vice versa.
- Use external links as well, for example link to other sources, bloggers or to affiliated products.
- Build backlinks – this is basically having high authority sites link back to your content.
- Have share buttons for every article so that when someone stumbles on your post, they can easily share it to social media.
- Ensure your website loading speed is not more than 3 seconds.
- Guest posting – this is technically doing a blog post exchange.
- Avoid downloading too many plugins or having too many pop-ups, ads and widgets on your site.
Blog Post Structure
HEADLINE
Your headline is the most important aspect of your blog post and should grab attention and invoke curiosity. Use a heading like “How To Apply Your Makeup In 4 Easy Steps” as opposed to “How To Apply Your Makeup“.
The headline is only one aspect in the structure of a perfect blog post. The other important steps to consider when writing a blog post as well as the factors that affect your SEO ranking, can be accessed inside my blog post template.
Read next:
14 Pinterest Mistakes That You Need To Stop
