How I Write SEO Optimised Blog Posts

Today, I wanted to walk you through how I write SEO optimised blog posts for my website, Medium, GitHub and now Facebook!

Luckily I only have to write each article once and then each platform requires just a bit of customisation.

Before we start, I’ve also written this article on Medium, Facebook, GitHub and my own website.

Okay, so it’s important to start from a good foundation. No one builds a sky scraper from the top-down!

I go through an 8 step process which goes a little something like this:

1. Brainstorm Ideas
2. Research Keywords
3. Complete Research or Test Systems
4. Write Article Spine
5. Write Article Content
6. Create or Grab Appropriate Images
7. Add External Links (E.G. iPhone, Apple, Microsoft)
8. Post + Cross Links
9. Relax!

I’ll cover each one of these steps in this article so that you too can write SEO focused posts to gain organic traffic for the topics you want.

This step can easily be the hardest or easiest. It’s deceptive!

What works best for me is finding something I’ve recently worked on, something that’s popular or something that I frequently reference myself. For example; if I find myself needing to go back to a website multiple times, then I will create a post for that very topic as it’s useful to me and most likely useful to others too.

If you’re still struggling, utilise AI tools such as ChatGPT to find ideas and inspiration. But I rarely use this, and rely solely on the issues I face day to day.

One final idea I have for brainstorming ideas, is to talk to friends and family. If you live with other people; ask them for ideas. It’s often much easier for people to give you ideas versus you creating each one of them. That’s the golden rule really:

Find the demand, create the supply!

Awesome! Now that you know what you want to write about, lets research some keywords to include in your posts so that Google and other search engines can index your site and suggest your content to the billions of searches that take place every single day.

The best tool I’ve found for this is the Free Keyword Generator by ahrefs:

Enter your topic(s) or related topic(s) here and see what is returned. Don’t get discouraged if nothing is suggested, you might be onto a new keyword or topic and be the first one to post for it!

However, ideally you’d want to aim for keywords that have a decent amount of traffic (1k+) and a keyword difficulty of 15 or less.

The Keyword Difficulty values refers to how hard it is to rank on Google for that term. If you check ‘VPN’, you’ll see that it’s basically impossible unless your a huge corporation

Make sure you get roughly 5 to 10 related keywords ready for your post. These also have to be sufficiently different or Google might see your content as spam due to the repetitive use of the same keyword(s).

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This one is quite specific to my technology focused role, it refers to having all the screenshots, data, logs or test systems ready for when you are writing the article.

Please, please, please don’t create a test system and then delete it prior to writing the article. You WILL have to refer back to it, probably multiples times, and keeping it around whilst you write your post is super helpful.

For example: in my post around installing Docker on Ubuntu, I had the Ubuntu virtual machine running the entire time I wrote my post so that I could reference back to it whenever I needed it.

This section might also mean fully researching your topic prior to writing. If it’s a completely new topic to you, don’t just watch a single video or read a single article and call it a day. You’ll be missing important knowledge and your post will just be a regurgitation.

You should now have your idea, keywords and be fully researched up to the eye balls. Now, it’s time to write the spine or outline of your article. Again, ChatGPT is often useful for creating a good structure to the article if this is something you struggle with.

If you only take one thing away from reading this, it should be this:

Make your content unique and human

Not only is it boring to not be yourself when you write, your originality is also praised highly by search engines and your audience. How weird would it be if your favourite YouTuber suddenly acted completely different? More often than not, the audience is there for you and not your content.

This is especially important when first starting out, writing SEO optimised posts isn’t easy. But if you like what your writing and how you’re writing it, you will be more consistent which does pay off in the long run.

On the technical side, I like to include the following elements in all my new articles:

1. A Quick Hello
2. Introduction
3. Post Headers and Subheaders
4. Recent Posts Section Somewhere In The Article
5. Conclusion

Now the fun part! If you’ve done all the previous steps, then this one should almost flow from your brain, through your fingertips and into your keyboard.

I write all my articles inside WordPress and then copy/paste it into the different platforms. I do this so that I can utilise SEO writing plugins to make creating SEO optimised blog posts easier.

I use a plugin called: Rank Math

They have a super cool plugin for WordPress which walks you through the entire writing process:

Once installed, you will get another toolbar on the right hand side of your article as you write it. It helps you incorporate the different keywords, set a good URL and snippet for Google to pick up and provides an overall score out of 100.

Don’t go crazy though trying to get a 100/100 perfect score on every single article. It comes across almost as robotic and Google can tell. Try to aim for 80+, or as long as the indicator is showing green:

I would suggest you always create your own images. You can do this via your smart phone, screen grabbing or scanning images. You can use free sites such as Unsplash, but Google will know that the image isn’t original and it could penalise the entire article because of it.

I’ve used a combination of both as it’s very hard to get perfect images whilst working from home. I’m in the same room day in and day out, so the images would get very repetitive. Either the ceiling, floor or door…

If you do need to grab images from Unsplash or another image source, make sure to confirm you have permission to use it. Even if it is ‘free use’, make sure to credit the original artist. This is just a nice way to give back to them!

Using original images will definitely help Google see your content as more SEO friendly.

This is definitely where having a decent camera, time to travel and also the knowledge on photo editing could really help your content. Casey Neistat is the person that most emphasises this aspect for me. He came onto YouTube with a very specific video format which instantly became his ‘brand’.

This section isn’t required, it but can help both your content and the readers. Say your writing an article about setting DHCP on a Windows server, some readers might not know what DHCP is, so linking to a Wikipedia page or another article can help them out.

At the end of the day, your writing posts to entertain or educate the reader and making new knowledge as easy as possible to reach is not a bad thing.

I also like to link out to anything that might ‘ring a bell’ with the readers. For example: I will link to iPhone, Apple, Microsoft, Linux etc purely for the benefit of the reader.

I post my content in this order: My website; Medium; Github and finally Facebook. I do this so that I can cross link to all the other article locations with the least disruption possible.

The article on my website might take 4 hours to start ranking on Google and gaining traffic, but Medium and Facebook are much more instant since those platforms have a much bigger user base and also implement ‘follow’ features.

This unfortunately is a manual process, at least for the time being. It’s also completely up to you as to which platforms you post on. Some are definitely better than others.

Awesome! You’ve followed all the steps above and have posted an SEO optimised blog post for your online following.

Whilst it’s not a difficult task, knowing all the steps and best practices is an every changing process and takes dedicated and maintained effort.

This section might be marked as Relax but it’s not really true. Depending on how often you post, you might have to start researching your new article straight away!

I don’t really have a set schedule, I usually post when a good topic pops into my head or I see an opportunity. I also have a wife, two young kids and a full time job, so finding time is might be the most difficult section. Should I add that? Nah!

That’s everything I had to cover off. You now know my entire posting regime for SEO optimised blog posts.

So If you ever ask yourself the questions ‘How Can I Write SEO Optimised Blog Posts’, I hope you find your way back to hear and pay closer attention that time.

It would be wrong of me not to mention that even though you might write the best article, focused on SEO and with all original content there is still no guarantee you will get views.

For this reason, I would recommend posting on as many different platforms as possible and cross pollinating to get a more even traffic flow.

Thanks for reading, I hope you found this helpful!

Enjoy! 🎉