How to write a blog post for SEO without need of technical knowledge

When you start learning about online business, you need to develop some competencies which you had not for your offline activities. One of them is to know how to write a blog post for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and that is so because you want to be recognized by the message you want to spread to the world, but you need first to be found online by this world.

To be found online in addition to writing quality content, you need to look at specific details of the structure and design of that content and the site in general to get a position in the main search engines. Although there is no such thing like magic or foolproof recipe to get the best ranking all the time, there are however some particular issues that can be addressed to optimize the options of your posts and pages to be positioned better in SERPs.

The question here for many people is how easy or hard is to understand all this seemingly technical stuff and if as an unexperienced webmaster you’d be able to manage it or if you need some specialist to do it for you.

The secret ingredients of the recipe for a good “blog post”

As more and more websites are created in the world, each of them tries to compete for the highest exposure since this represents a more significant number of visitors and therefore better results in performance, including revenues. What was once a simple task of practically voluntary indexing on the Yahoo platform in the 90s, became a fight not only among the gradual increase of websites but also between webmasters and search engines.

Some old factors which sometimes were useful for ranking like keywords alone and backlinks became a tool for some guys who used them indiscriminately and even abused them unethically. This resulted in a lot of trash pages ranked very high, while others with more valuable content got hidden in deep positions.

As search engines have evolved to adjust their protocols to identify the best factors to be taken into account for ranking pages as well as penalize those behaviors considered as abusive and harmful (black hat, like those of the villains in western movies) for the whole internet environment.

Google has mastered the evaluation of websites by designing a mathematical algorithm, which is a sequence of tasks aimed to explore several factors within a webpage to give it a rank. They have improved de efficacy of such algorithm to impose limitations to those people who try to trick the system as well as helpt those people who are working hard to give honest and valuable products through their websites.

Significant adjustments in the Google’s algorithm such Panda at 2011, Penguin at 2012 and then Hummingbird at 2013 were developed to penalize duplicate content and manipulative techniques to get better rankings (Spam SEO) or to understand the natural language and semantic meaning of a website.

At present the most relevant factor for Google and other search engines to grant a proper positioning on SERPs to a website is that it creates high-quality content and design for the best user experience, so they want to use it and share with other people.

Everyone talks about SEO but …

For years both lays and experts have talked about SEO. It is one of those terms that seem to give certain cachet to talk. At the same time, it has become a gray area of the online business arena where apparently just the most versed can understand and master the most recondite secrets of this topic.

It is true that search engines, mainly Google, have kept hidden many of the factors they take into account when it comes to exploring a website. This has given rise to speculations of all type as well as to get the opportunity to some cleaver individuals to take advantage of it by self-promoting as experts able to crack the code and manipulate the core and branches of the Google’s algorithm.

It is also true though that Google states clearly what some of its adjustments are about while those which are kept in secret pertains to a whole philosophy that looks for high quality and the best user experience from all perspectives. As a matter of comparison, we can say that nobody knows what precisely the Nobel Committee or the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences search for in specific work to award it the Nobel Prize or the Oscar, although everybody knows that they are looking for originality, contribution to society and excellence.

However, we know precisely what Google doesn’t like, and what gets penalized when it’s carried out. Among other things you can check out in the Google Webmaster Guidelines, there are:

• Automatically generated content
• Cloaking
• Doorway pages
• Hidden text or links
• Linkbuilding
• Stuffing keywords, etc

The watchful eye of Google and other search engines

Some people like Saul Hansell from the New York Times have pointed out that Google algorithms use more than “200 types of information or signals” for ranking pages. Words, images, and links are, of course, one of those signals; however, there are many more which are not disclosed by the company.

However many trial error tests, some assumptions that have proved be true along the time and veiled suggestions by present and former officials like Matt Cutts among other things have allowed outlining some clues about some of the most relevant points that Google look for when ranking a determined website. Here are briefly listed some of them:

1. Mobile-friendly website. It explains by itself, and you can quickly check it out here
2. Clean design, free from advertising above the fold. That is what a visitor can see at first sight when lands on your homepage.
3. Accessible, Attractive, and Functional Design. A lower bounce rate that means people who just visit the first page and leave.
4. Easy access to crawl or spider web to explore the webpages without delay, avoiding the use of Flash or JavaScript. This crawler is Google’s responsibility, allow it to do its job is yours.
5. Hosting in a reliable server. For example, that is fast, stable, and that data is not lost.
6. Optimized URL. Utilizes relevant keywords on it.
7. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate and link HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure). Which means that your website is safer for navigation. Again don’t be afraid, URL domains and hosting providers will offer this functionality automated for your website, although not by default.
8. SiteMap. There are plugins to help you to generate an XML Sitemap and use within Google Webmaster Tools for indexing purposes.
9. High-quality content. Remember “CONTENT IS KING”
10. Keyword presence and density. Content should have keywords relevant to the content but not more than 4% of the whole text.
11. Meta Tags. Meta Title and Meta Description, that short description under the webpage link on SERPs. Don’t panic! There are boxes designed explicitly on the board of your site to fill them, although many people do not even take them into account. Meta-title is the second more critical factor for ranking after content as the first one.
12. Updates. Also with original and high-quality content
13. Visits from Social Media or related websites. They count as relevant backlinks.If you are interested in learning how to optimize your site for search engines, Wealthy Affiliate offers a comprehensive five-level course, the first of which consists of 10 lessons is free. Also, the Premium subscription includes hosting the site on a server with the highest reliability and features such as SSL certificate among many other benefits. For More Information CLICK HERE
    

The race for the best ranking

Maybe you are wondering when it is going to be the exact moment when your post or page would start to get indexed and ranked. This is something that is not revealed by the search engines either, even though the amount of past content, the age of your website and overall its authority play in your favor or against you in terms of the speed at which your post or page will be ranked, either could be hours, days or even weeks.

Having said that you should keep in mind that the race for better rankings it is not against anyone but yourself and your website and that it starts even before that you have written the first word of a page or post.

How is that possible?

From the list of the previous section, the first eight points are mainly if not exclusively related to the optimization of the site rather than an individual post or page.

Then optimization continues when you start writing your first word of great content, check out places, and the proportion of keywords as well as complete meta tags (title and description).

So, are you sure that you have checked each one of the points of the list before you publish your post or page?

Ready, set, go!

So you want visitors, right?

At the end of the day when taking care of so many variables for search engine optimization, it is easy to lose at least at the beginning the real purpose for which the work is being carried out. It could turn out not just time-consuming but also leave second the core message of the post.

According to not only to experts in the field and again Google officials, what it is intended right now with most of the websites is that they offer valuable content and a great user experience manifested by the time they stay in a page, the bounce rate and comments among other things.

So as time goes by, search engines will put more and more attention to how each website complies with such user experience and how much does it contribute to the general community online.

The message then is that you keep your mind on meeting the needs of your audience more than the requirements of the search engines, which will result in a long-term benefit.

Are you going to hire an expert, really?

As you can see, controlling much of the signals potentially explored by Google’s web spiders for SEO purposes are at your fingertips. So it is just a matter of having a checklist to be sure that you are doing everything that is needed to do.

If you want to check out how well your website is performing in several areas of SEO after you have done your homework, then you can find several free tools like SEOptimer, SEOMATOR, SITECHECKER, just to name a few which will crawl your website in a few minutes to give you a report of every aspect of your optimization. In case you would like to go deeper into this analysis, the costs should not exceed a few dollars for the full report.

However, if despite the above, you still want to hire an expert to do your SEO analysis, you should consider at least three things:

An audit conducted by a professional is usually much more expensive (several tens of dollars) than an automated analysis like the one mentioned, and there is no guarantee that such an intervention will generate results significantly different from those you could obtain for yourself with some effort.

Ask the expert for evidence of a site optimized by him, either his own or a third party that can be compared to yours and that is obtaining the results you wish to achieve.

Finally, make sure that the methodology that the expert uses for optimization does not resort to black hat techniques which, as already mentioned, are censored and penalized by Google and can damage your business in the long run.