How To Format Blog Posts For Search Engine Optimization
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If you’re new to the world of content marketing and are looking to brush up your skills in the art of writing (and formatting) blog posts so that they’ll provide search engine value to your website, this post will be the perfect primer for you.
My intention with this post is to help you understand how to write blogs with search engine optimization (SEO) value and why you should write your content in a certain way.
Let’s dive in.
Writing for SEO
When sitting down to write a blog post for your website, remember these two words: clarity and simplicity.
A blog isn’t a novel. It also isn’t a research paper or a journal entry.
People read blogs to solve problems or learn something new. They want to do both of those things quickly.
The median average time spent reading an article or blog is a whopping 37 seconds.
You have just over half a minute to capture the reader’s attention and inform them about whatever it is you’re writing about.
That’s a lot of pressure!
It’s also why I can’t stress clarity and simplicity enough.
↠ Don’t use words the average person doesn’t understand
↠ Don’t ramble — get to the point
↠ Make your blog easily skimmable
Let’s shift our focus to skimmability.
Format properly
Proper formatting ensures readers can easily skim your blog for answers while providing a hierarchical framework for search engines to crawl and prioritize content.
Does that make sense?
Look at your blog the same way an author would a book. Every book you read has a title. It also has chapters. Sometimes, chapters also have chapters within chapters.
Different sized fonts and bolded and italicized text often represent these tiles, chapters, and chapters within chapters.
