Writing SEO-friendly blog posts is an essential component of digital marketing success, and these tips can help you craft content that both engages your target audience and raises rankings.

This guide will address five areas of blog posts: keywords, headings, supplemental resources, videos and calls-to-actions. Each of these will be explored individually to provide advice and best practices on optimizing them for your own posts.

Keywords

Once you gain an understanding of SEO, writing a quality blog post becomes much simpler. The basics include researching keywords and strategically using them throughout your post as well as optimizing images.

Keywords are words users type into search engines to search. When researching keywords, seek those with high search volumes and low competition so you can rank high in SERP results and attract more readers.

No one should overstuff their content with target keywords - this is known as keyword spamming, and Google penalizes websites who do this. Plus it looks bad to readers and detracts from the quality of blog posts. Instead, include target keywords into title tag, first paragraph, meta description and alt text for any images included in blog posts as a way of keeping readers engaged and improving quality content.

Subheadings

Subheadings in blog posts should be easily understandable and provide an outline of the post's content, so search engines can understand and recognize it easily. But be wary of using keywords just to satisfy search engine robots - doing this may end up alienating readers while incurring penalties from search algorithms. Instead, prioritise clarity and natural language usage in your subheadings.

A blog post's meta description offers an opportunity to add keywords and showcase an author's expertise. Additionally, it appears with SERP results, encouraging visitors to click your page. While meta descriptions serve as indirect ranking factors and can't replace high-quality and relevant content creation efforts - they remain an essential element of an SEO strategy.

Images

Integrating images into blog posts is an effective way to keep visitors on your website longer, decreasing bounce rate and improving SEO. But for best results, images must both fit with your brand image and are SEO friendly.

Image file names and alt text provide search engines with clues as to the relevancy of an image for any query, so be sure to name your images appropriately without using keyword stuffing tactics.

ImageOptim and Pichi are great tools for optimizing image files so they'll load faster on pages, helping reduce page load times.

Supplementary resources

In order to rank on search engines, your blog posts need to be optimized with relevant keywords and content that satisfies users' intent. Search engines seek this type of helpful and meaningful material from authors that is well written.

That is why your blog post must cover its topic thoroughly and address any potential queries from users about it. Use tools such as Answer the Public and Google's "People also ask" and "Related searches" features to discover topics or questions you can cover in detail.

One way you can increase user engagement on your site and signal to search engines that your post fulfils user intent is by including internal links between blog posts and pages on it. Doing this allows visitors to freely explore your content while at the same time signalling search engines that it does so.

Videos

Videos can be an effective way to engage visitors on your website and break up large stretches of text, as well as provide essential information and boost search rankings for video search.

Make sure your video is relevant to the keywords you're targeting by optimizing its title, description and tags. Host your video on popular video hosting platforms like YouTube while embedding it onto your site with schema markup so search engines can index it effectively.

Be sure to create an eye-catching thumbnail and include a transcript for Google to index as a rich result, which will increase clicks, traffic, and engagement on SERPs. Also make sure that image SEO best practices such as compressing files are followed - these strategies could result in even greater clicks!