One of the questions I'm frequently asked is "how do I write a blog post so it gets noticed?"

The first thing to consider is that when you are writing your blog posts, you have to please both the search engine spiders as well as your human visitors, but there are ways of creating great blog posts so you please both. 

The second thing to consider is that no matter how beautifully your blog posts are written - they could sound like prose from Shakespeare - if they are devoid of keywords, you'll find it harder to get free search engine traffic.  Google for example thrives on keyword focused content that is relevant to the reader, but without stuffing your posts with keywords that make it look and sound artificial. 

Google now uses something called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to match phrases on a page or post to determine it's relevancy and with over 600,000 phrases used to compare against your blog posts, I would say the days of keyword stuffing are truly over. 

But before I lose you with technical jargon, let's look at the 5 top ways in which you can ensure you write better blog posts to please both the search engine spiders and your human readers:

• Try and include the keyword in your title.  This truly is important because this is the first thing the search engine spiders see when they come to view your web page - and each blog post is a separate web page to the search engine spiders.  If using the keywords in the title say using WordPress, you can use the all in one SEO plugin, which will give you the option of writing a more appealing title for your human readers and then using a manual override for the search engines.
  
• Use a H1 tag where possible and again, unless it will make it look artificial, add the keyword to the H1 tag.  This isn't just appealing to the search engines, it's kind of a follow on or sub head to your readers who will get more of an understanding of what your blog post is about.
  
• Inject some human life and personality into your blog posts.  I read some blog posts and feel as if I'm writing my dissertation all over again.  If you write as though you are addressing one specific person, may be a friend, then your writing is likely to flow better and sound as though you really are interested in writing about the chosen topic.  And it's okay to use "I" instead of "WE" MBA'ers! 
  
• Use relevant links in your blog posts and where possible, link your keywords - which could be an actual word or phrase.
  
• Break your blog article into sub headings and/or bulleted lists.  This really does help the reader skim if they prefer but also removes what can feel like an arduous task out of reading longer posts.

Hope you found this useful,

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