How to Write an SEO Friendly Article: 10 Steps

This article has been brought fully up to date.

The search engine optimization tips gathered here are the ones every new blogger needs. Ranking near the top of the results brings traffic to your site, so these are the on-page blog SEO steps that help you get there.

Getting used to on-page SEO and publishing to the same standard every time matters a great deal. I also know that, like most bloggers, you found blog SEO confusing and a little intimidating at first. There is nothing to worry about: this is written plainly, one step at a time.

The SEO world keeps moving, but some fundamentals never age. This guide puts those long standing steps next to what Google expects today. The aim is not to tick off a checklist but to understand why each step matters, so your content becomes the first place both readers and search engines go.

You can listen to this piece instead of reading it. The episode is in Turkish.

With the pressure off, read on for the simple blog SEO steps that actually produce results.

The best thing about this piece is how straightforward it is, and how plainly we have tried to set it out.

Every professional blogger makes sure the on-page SEO basics are in place before anything goes live.

If you still feel overwhelmed after reading these blog SEO tips, leave your thoughts or questions in the comments and we will help you work through them.

Let us get to it and start optimizing your posts and lifting your organic blog traffic.

How to Write an SEO Friendly Article

This piece covers what to do before you press Publish.

These steps are usually called on-page SEO. They refer to what actually sits on a page or a blog post.

You will also see it written as onsite SEO or OnPage SEO.

Unlike technical SEO work, on-page SEO is far easier to apply yourself.

Off-page SEO matters too, but it needs a post of its own. It is mostly about building backlinks to your site.

Any page or post you want found on Google or another search engine has to be optimized around keywords.

The good news is that your site is yours to control.

You can set it up so that when Google's crawlers come through, they find your post and your good content and conclude “yes, this is clearly about XYZ and it should be indexed for that search”.

They do not literally say it, but you take my meaning.

So what does on-page SEO involve?

It really comes down to three things:

• Keywords: the right ones, in the right places, through the post
• Links: internal and external
• Genuinely good content

You have probably noticed the podcast episode in this piece on blog SEO; we have been improving the format.

Second, you need to think about links, both from your own site and from other sites with authority. There are several ways these help your position in Google, and we will come back to them.

Last, you have to make something people want to read. What helps Google decide whether your posts are good enough to rank higher is that the content actually gets read.

It also earns you backlinks as people link to your work from their own posts, which lifts your domain authority (DA). That can feed into where you sit in Google's results.

All of it starts with asking the right question. Not just “what are people searching for?” but “what does the person running this search hope to find?” That is search intent. Keyword research is no longer about finding words; it is about reading the intent behind them (learning something, buying something, comparing options). Build your strategy on the intent and reaching the right audience follows.

The SEO Plugins Bloggers Should Know

Before you learn the rest of these tips and start optimizing your posts and pages, install one of the two plugins below:

The Yoast SEO plugin

This one helps you handle the technical and on-page SEO of your blog and its posts.

The free version of the Yoast SEO plugin is very good, but if you want to push your blog further, get the PRO version.

The free version makes it easy to tell Google what your site is about: structure, keywords, meta descriptions and so on.

The PRO version helps you find pages worth linking to internally and lets you optimize for up to five keywords.

NOTE : Yoast does not automatically raise your position in Google. It guides you by pointing out whether you are doing the right things with your content, your links and your images. SEO and search rankings take a good deal more than a plugin. We will come to that.

Rank Math SEO

Rank Math is the SEO plugin I generally use on my own blogs.

It is the newer of the two and it has made a lot of noise in the plugin world. Plenty of Yoast PRO users have moved across to it.

Why? Because the free version of Rank Math carries many of the features Yoast keeps for PRO.

It also lets you track more than one keyword for your on-page SEO.

Yoast has the more advanced feature set, but Rank Math SEO is a good way to optimize your posts if you are new to this or blogging on a tight budget.

I moved to Rank Math SEO recently, although the screenshots in this article still come from Yoast. Türk SEM has moved to the Rank Math SEO plugin as well.

Note: Rank Math SEO has newer PRO features too, but the free version is perfectly fine while you are starting out.

Getting Started With SEO on Your Blog

Now for the detail of how on-page SEO is actually done.

Keep in mind that these are the fundamentals. Everyone has to start somewhere. The plugin is installed. Let us begin.

1. Keywords Are the Key to the Right SEO Content

Before optimizing a single post, we have to look at the first item on the list: finding the right keywords.

Blogs with sound SEO behind them arrive with a keyword phrase, and a set of related phrases, that give them a chance of ranking in Google and elsewhere.

It can look daunting at the start, but keyword research is how organic traffic finds your site.

It does not matter whether you write the post first and fit the keywords in afterwards. It does not matter if you add them as you go, either.

What matters is that your keywords are in the post before you press Publish.

Tools and techniques for finding keywords

Finding keywords can be hard work, especially since the best known SEO tools (Semrush, Ahrefs and the Moz keyword tool) run expensive. The Türk SEM keyword research tool will get you started.

The free Türk SEM keyword research tool is enough for a first pass.

Once you have brainstormed, the Keywords Everywhere Chrome extension helps you refine what you found. It has been genuinely useful and it costs very little.

Free SEO tools for finding keywords include:

• Answerthepublic
• Google Search Console
• our keyword tool

A rule of thumb:

• A single keyword will have a great deal of competition.
• Longer keyword phrases have less.
• The more specific the longer phrase, the more likely the competition thins out.

Do you want my best SEO tip for new bloggers?

Go for low competition long tail keywords first. Bear in mind that a long tail page may not send you much traffic at the start.

Once a post has “matured” and you have updated it, you can start ranking for more competitive, higher volume terms.

You will have to wait a few months before that happens.

So what is the easiest way to find keywords? Google itself, naturally.

TIP : The 5 steps to building a successful website – use it to check whether your own site has all five in place.

Using Google itself to find keywords

I spend a lot of time looking at what people search for. Type in the phrase you have your eye on and note what kind of posts hold the first page.

Ask yourself:

• What kind of keyword phrases are they using in their titles?
• What are they using as keywords in their meta descriptions?
• When I open the first three or four posts, which phrases keep coming back?

As soon as you start typing into Google's search box, it tells you what people are looking for around that keyword.

So there are plenty of ways to learn which keywords are worth having.

WRITE THEM DOWN. Keep a list and go back to it while you write and while you edit.

2. Put Your Keyword in the Post Title

The first place you optimize a post is the title, by putting your chosen keyword phrase into it.

Your title is the shop window of the article. Putting your main keyword phrase in the heading (the H1) and in the SEO title tells Google immediately what the piece is about. What counts more, though, is that your title makes a promise to the person reading the results. A title that raises curiosity, leads with the benefit and sums the subject up cleanly moves your click-through rate (CTR) directly.

Say plainly, from the first line, what people are looking for and what your post is about.

There are two titles to think about:

• the SEO title that appears in the search results
• the heading (h1) the reader sees when they land on the post or page

The SEO title (title) has rules around it, so let us look at that one.

A good title with a keyword in it does several jobs at once:

• It tells the reader exactly what the post covers and what they get out of reading it.
• It tells Google what the subject of the post is (it picks up your keyword phrase).
• It should make the reader want to click and read on.

An SEO title should be short but descriptive, and it should read easily. If it runs long, Google cuts it after a certain number of characters (60).

If you use the Yoast SEO plugin or Rank Math, both of them show you how long your title can run before Google truncates it.

3. Your SEO Meta Description

The meta description is not a direct ranking factor, but indirectly it is one of the strongest things you have. It is your 160 character advertising space in the results. Use your keyword there to confirm the subject matches, and write a summary that tells the reader “the answer you want is behind this link”.

Next on our list of blog SEO tips is the meta description itself.

It is the snippet summary that sits under your title when your post ranks in Google. This is what tells the reader, in more detail, what to expect from your post.

Copying your blog title and dropping the keyword phrase in is not enough.

It has to stay true to the content while being interesting to read.

Use action words and your long tail phrase to tell the reader what they gain by reading the post.

Power words or action words for a meta description can be anything along these lines:

• learn
• understand
• join
• discover
• subscribe
• try
• uncover
• build
• start

Meta descriptions usually run to about 160 characters.

Again, Yoast SEO or Rank Math lets you edit the description easily.

Both plugins warn you when you pass the 120 to 158 characters Google recommends. Anything beyond that gets cut.

This is what you see when you make the change in the Yoast SEO plugin.

A PRO TIP: write the meta description as though it were a tweet. This is exactly the place where you have to convince someone to open your link.

A SECOND PRO TIP: never copy meta descriptions. Write a distinct, arresting summary for the post in question.

4. Put the Keyword in Your Permalink

Your URL structure is the filing cabinet of your site. For users and for search engines it should be short, descriptive and true to the subject. A clean URL carrying your keyword, something like .../seo-friendly-article-guide, strengthens the relevance signal and makes the link easier to share.

The permalink (the slug) is a short, human readable URL you can shape around your keyword phrase. Keep accented and non-Latin characters out of it: they get percent encoded and the address turns unreadable.

To change it, set your permalinks to Custom, “%postname%”. Doing this at the very beginning of a blog matters a great deal.

There are three ways to get the keyword phrase in .

In the classic WordPress editor, the URL field in the Post tab on the right.

In the block editor, open Document and scroll down to Permalink.

And finally, you can change the permalink from within the Rank Math SEO plugin.

NOTE: if you change permalinks after posts are already published, you will need a redirection plugin. That way your old URLs point at the new “%postname%” versions. To avoid having to sort this out later, have a look at our WordPress SEO settings guide.

5. Put Your Keyword in the First Paragraph

When someone clicks through to your site, they decide within seconds whether they are in the right place. Naming the subject and the keyword inside the first 100 words tells the reader “yes, this is it” and keeps them there (which lowers your bounce rate), and it shows Google your content delivers what it promised.

For SEO to work on your blog, you have to tell the reader and Google what the post is about in the first paragraph.

That first paragraph should be a short summary containing the keyword phrase.

Setting the context with your keyword phrase in the opening has always made sense. A first paragraph is rarely longer than three sentences.

For that summary I would keep the language easy and flowing. Readers like plain writing, and it leaves them thinking: “this could help me; this is about the problem I have.” 

6. Work Your Keywords Through the Post

People used to talk about sprinkling a keyword through the text at a set percentage. That no longer holds. Google understands topics, not words. Alongside the keyword itself, answer the related terms, the synonyms and the sub-questions people ask, in a natural flow through the article. That is what shows the depth of your content and your command of the subject.

Remember I told you to write down several long tail keyword phrases?

Now it is time to use the main one, the second and the third across the post. Working them into the content is one of the most important parts of good blog SEO.

If you wrote the post first, read it out loud while editing and see whether your keywords can go in across the whole piece. Aim to spread them evenly.

If your main phrase does not flow well somewhere, use your secondary one.

Google is intuitive enough to work out whether you are using related phrases that all point at one topic. That intuition can land your post on better ranking keywords than the ones you had in mind while optimizing it.

I like using Rank Math SEO or the Yoast plugin because they tell me whether I am doing a decent job of working keywords through the piece.

They also count how many times I used the phrase. Rank Math lets you add several keyword phrases. You can do the same with Yoast PRO.

7. Put Your Keyword in the Image Alt Text

The alt text you add to images is first of all a guide for screen readers used by people who cannot see the image. Writing alt text that describes the picture accurately makes your site more accessible. That same correct use also helps Google understand the image and surface your content in image search.

One of the most important blog SEO tips is not to ignore the alternative text on your images.

The last place your keyword phrase belongs, for good blog SEO, is the alt text of your image.

When your image fails to appear for some technical reason, the alt text takes its place, and text that describes the picture helps everybody.

It also gives your content SEO support by helping Google understand what your blog is about.

Optimizing your posts with alt text is what gets you listed in Google's “Images” results for people searching visually, which means new visitors.

So how do you apply it to the images in your post?

If you upload with the classic editor, click the image to edit it and add the alt text there.

In the block editor, an empty box for alt text appears on the right as soon as you insert the image.

Alt text should be a short phrase that describes the image and contains your keyword phrase. The alt text below, for instance, reads: “Blog SEO tips”

8. Use Relevant Internal Links

Linking your posts to one another is one of the most valuable things you can do for blog traffic.

Most bloggers skip it, and it is one of the best ways there is to optimize your content.

You almost certainly have two or three posts related to whatever you are writing now. Why not tell your readers about them? It gives search engines something to work with as well.

For on-page SEO it is a good idea to link from this new post back to older ones, so they can improve their own positions.

Internal links also send traffic to the rest of your blog.

With internal links readers spend longer on your blog, which signals to Google and other search engines that your blog holds content worth their time. That can help your posts improve their positions together.

It also helps Google make better sense of your content when it crawls the site.

Getting the anchor text right, the phrase you attach the link to, matters just as much.

You have to help Google work out what the link is about. Attaching it to “click here” or to a bare URL makes that harder for a search engine. Put the subject of the target into the anchor text instead.

Rank Math and Yoast Pro help you spot similar posts, which makes internal linking far quicker.

In some cases, though, a quick manual search through your own posts turns up what the plugins missed.

I recommend searching your own blog to be sure you have not left anything out.

9. Link Out to External Content

The last thing to think about for blog SEO is external links.

Linking to authoritative sites related to your content can lift the credibility of your own.

It also helps your position, because you are giving users quality information to refer to.

When you add an external link, tick the option to open it in a new window.

The reason is simple: you would rather your visitors stayed on your site than left it for someone else's.

Remember, the longer a visitor stays with you, the better your site looks to Google and the other search engines.

Moz has written a good piece for anyone who wants to understand external links properly: it explains external links for on-page SEO in more detail.

Do not think of an external link as people leaving your site. Think of it as giving your readers something valuable to refer to inside your post. You did the right thing by them.

10. Great Content Is the Key to Good On-Page SEO

When it is a question of genuinely good content and a post optimized for search, a few things are worth keeping in mind.

• Where there is information to give, go longer and deeper. Search engines prefer posts of 1000 words and above to posts under 300 words.
• Use headings with keywords in them wherever you can; those are the H2, H3 and H4 tags. It makes the piece friendlier to read and search engines pick up what the headings say. H1 is used for the post title, so do not use it again in the body. Every page carries one H1.
• Make sure you have no broken links. This matters in particular when you are updating older posts and optimizing them. 
• Put a call to action at the end to encourage comments. Writing a comment keeps a reader on your site longer and signals to Google and the others that your blog is full of useful material.

Helping a reader solve a problem, or giving them the information they came for, raises the quality of your posts enormously.

Optimizing your posts takes a little effort, and it is still the best way there is to earn organic traffic.

TIP : our guide to headings and subheadings covers the important details.

Blog SEO Tips: the Short Version

By now you can see that on-page SEO is not hard. It takes a little time and almost nothing technical. On-page SEO for your posts is less about search engines than about solving the problem your title raised.

Optimizing every post as you write and publish it should become something you simply do. After a while it costs you no thought at all.

Here is the short version of the steps for optimizing any post:

• Start with a list of the right keyword and the longer phrases around it.
• Put the keyword phrase into the post title.
• Write a meta description containing your keyword phrase, interesting enough to invite readers into the subject.
• Put the keyword into the content itself.
• Use the keyword phrase in the first paragraph of the post.
• Spread the main phrase and the others evenly through the post.
• Add alt text containing your keyword to the images in the post.
• Add internal links to your other posts on the subject.
• Add links to authoritative, informative external sites.

One last thing: optimize your About page against the same criteria, so that you and your blog can be found. If you want to be understood as a blog in a particular niche, your About page is where those specific, relevant keywords belong.