How to write a blog post that succeeds and is SEO-friendly

Writing a blog article is very easy, especially if you use WordPress. It is much harder to write an article that 10,000+ people will read and that will benefit both these readers and you. If an article or blog post has high informational value, it spreads among people quite well.

Ideally, it spreads not only on social media but also persuades other users to send the article to their friends or link to it from their own websites. Last but not least, it is great when it also persuades Google that it deserves to rank at the top for relevant phrases. The article then becomes one of the best answers in that language for the chosen keyword.

Did you know? When you write about something you understand and enjoy, you are much more likely to succeed. Here you can see how a great article on zijuspesne.cz ranks for the very popular search phrase “nevím co k obědu” (“I don’t know what to have for lunch”). Just check it in Google.

I have also written a more detailed article on a similar topic for the Digichef website.

How to write a successful blog article

If the article is rather average, however, it is good for readers to find it on their own. Organic search is one such channel, which in the Czech Republic means mainly Google, but also Seznam and Bing.

The goal of every search engine is to give users the most relevant search results for a given query. Put simply, they rank the most comprehensive, best and purpose-written articles at the top.

Search intent also matters, as it defines what lies behind a given search keyword. So if you are a beginner writer with a main keyword assigned, your goal is to get your article to the first position. You need to work out the search intent and put the most important information at the start of the text.

Attributes of successful articles:

• Useful
• Interesting
• Enriching
• Clear
• Long
• Comprehensive
• SEO friendly (search engines will like them and they will not be penalised)
• UX friendly (users will like them and find them pleasant to read)

As a final point, you can add “the best”. When you write an article, you should choose one keyword or phrase to focus on primarily. You can then rank further keywords that you will focus on more marginally, giving them short paragraphs or just a mention.

Your article should clearly answer the search keyword in the introduction. The rest of the article should then provide additional information and also focus on the related, less important keywords ranked after the main keyword.

How to write a blog post step by step

If you are new to blogging, follow the same sequence every time. This order stops you from polishing sentences before you know what the article needs to say.

• Pick one reader and one question. Decide who the article is for and what they should know or be able to do after reading it.
• Gather your material. Collect your own experience, examples, facts you can verify and the points other articles on the topic leave out.
• Build an outline. Turn your notes into headings with a short list of points under each one.
• Write the first draft quickly. Get everything down without stopping to edit. You will fix the wording later.
• Edit in separate passes. Check the structure first, then clarity, then grammar and spelling.
• Format for easy reading. Add subheadings, lists and images only where they genuinely help.
• Review and update. Read the preview before publishing, and come back to the article when information changes.

The heading and title are decisive

The heading and title determine which keywords we want to target. Overall, this is probably the most important part of an article’s focus.

Every heading and title should be put together with great care. It should be extremely attractive to readers, but it should also contain the keywords you want to benefit from in organic traffic (that is, the main keyword we have chosen).

Readers are attracted by numbers, tips, the current year, provocative questions and catchy phrases. Use power words.

Search engines are attracted by keywords, but also by CTR, meaning how often users choose your article in the feed/SERP over the others, given the position the article holds. Articles with an excellent CTR can then move up to better positions, and vice versa.

An article’s success and future position also depend on how well it satisfies the search and matches the searcher’s intent. Put simply, if you have an article on “kam vyrazit na rande” (“where to go on a date”), people expect an article with specific tips on where to take a girl on a date. If you describe what to do on a date instead, you will not fully match the user’s intent (you can cover that in the second part of the article or in a follow-up article).

CTR: Simply means click-through rate. It is the ratio between clicks on a particular element and the total number of impressions of that element. In Google search specifically, it is the ratio between impressions in organic search and clicks on a given title (search result).

Every owner of an e-commerce website or blog should check the quality of their titles in a tool from time to time. Are they really attractive to users? Google Search Console works well for this, as you can easily filter key pages and phrases there.

What should you focus on? Above all, pages that appear in positions 3 to 8 in search and have a dreadfully low CTR. You can then assess the cause of the low CTR and create a new, more attractive title. You can take inspiration from competitors or try to judge for yourself how attractive the title will be to the audience.

Where to find relevant keywords

The answer is everywhere. Google’s own results are a good source. You should always analyse the first organic search result thoroughly and ask yourself why is it first?

Use handy helpers. The first is Keyword Everywhere, a very useful browser extension that serves up many interesting and relevant phrases.

If you are happy to pay extra for quality, then in my view Ahrefs is the best. With Ahrefs, a skilled person has a very good overview of all the keywords in the industry, the competition for individual keywords and their approximate value.

Do not forget to make full use of everything the Google search engine offers, for example the related phrases at the bottom of the results page. If you need thorough research on a topic, you can also search for and explore related search queries.

Article content for search engines and users

Do you know those articles that look like a thesis when you open them? There are still plenty of them online. However, if the content and author are unique enough, even these articles get read and searched for.

In general, successful web articles should have:

• short paragraphs of 2.5 to 6 lines
• headings to break up the text (2 to 5 shorter paragraphs between headings)
• a hypertext menu (anchors in the text)
• internal links to other relevant pages on the website
• lists and quotations
• clear line spacing (ideally 1.7)
• a readable font size (between 16 and 17)
• good colour contrast of text and other elements

Hypertext menus, or anchors in the text, are used more and more often. You can see one in this article right below the first paragraph, which is the recommended place for it. If the website has no other sidebar, this space can also be used for a pinned hypertext menu with anchors.

Successful articles must combine an attractive form with unique and useful content.

Do not overdo bold text. When a paragraph has more than two bold passages, the highlighted text loses attention and looks rather chaotic. Likewise, combining links with bold text is not a good idea.

How to write a blog post outline

An outline is the skeleton of your article. It shows you in advance whether the text follows a logical order and whether anything important is missing. Fixing that at this stage is much easier than in a finished draft.

Start by writing the main message of the article in one sentence. Then list every question your reader is likely to have and group related questions together. Each group becomes a heading. Under each heading, note two to four points you want to make, plus any example, image or list that belongs there.

A simple outline for an article about choosing running shoes might look like this:

• Introduction with the short answer
• How to find out your foot type
• Cushioning and support explained
• When to replace your shoes
• Conclusion with a quick checklist

When the outline is ready, read only the headings. If they tell the story of the article on their own, the structure works.

Basic SEO essentials of an article

When you write an article, you should have a basic list of keywords and know in advance roughly what structure the article will have. Ideally, you should place the main keyword in the heading and title in its basic form (nominative case) and as close to the beginning as possible. This is not mandatory, though, and it is more important for the heading to be attractive and understandable to users. If you can combine both, that is a bonus point for you.

Did you know? The division into SEO articles, PR articles and others still persists today. Many people still think an SEO article is an article for Google that people cannot read, and a PR article is just an obvious marketing message. That is a mistake. It is important to learn to write SEO-friendly articles that satisfy both users and Google. With paid articles, on the other hand, it is important to get past that obviousness and create original, useful content.

What to check and in what order of priority

• Image ALT
• Image or photo size
• Internal links
• Name (article h1 heading)
• Title (meta title)
• Description (meta description)

An aspect that is still often overlooked is the optimisation of the images an article should contain. In WordPress, focus mainly on image size, which should ideally be under 150 KB. You should also fill in a suitable image name, ALT text, Description and Caption.

The most important of these four is the ALT text, which should be roughly 3 to 5 words long. The ALT text should include the article’s keywords, but it should also describe what the image shows. Centre images in the article. In the text, it is best to place an image below the paragraph that best describes it, so it can illustrate what the reader has just read. When structuring the article, it is also good to place an image before the next heading, as this lets you neatly separate and close a section of the article. Conversely, an image placed directly below a heading may not look good.

The article’s main image or photo should be uploaded as the Featured image in the right sidebar. With most themes, you no longer need to insert this photo at the start of the body text, as it will appear there automatically.

Use relevant internal linking. A good article should be connected to other parts of the website. If you know the website well, you can easily link to other important pages from relevant anchor texts. If you are writing an article for someone else’s website, it helps to have a link building spreadsheet for the project that highlights the website’s primary pages, so you can search through them quickly and clearly.

How many internal links should an article have? It varies and depends on the length of the article. The links also should not feel artificial. They should genuinely help the user.

You fill in the meta description using the Yoast SEO plugin at the bottom of the post editor, where you can also check the length of the title that appears in search engines. The meta description is no longer a major SEO factor, so it gets less and less attention. Still, make sure you fill it in, and imagine what would catch your eye in the meta description for that article. You can also use emoji✔️, which can increase the CTR (the article’s click-through rate) once they appear in the SERP.

More tips for better article “SEO”

The following advice and tips are based on testing and on articles by experts abroad.

1. Every page, like every post, should have one main h1 heading. On most websites, the main heading is set as h1 by default. This was true for many years, but it now turns out that Google can cope quite well even when there are only h2 headings everywhere. More than ever before, search engines now look at the size and position of a heading to work out its hierarchy and importance on the page.

It is not a good idea to style all headings from h1 to h6 in the same size and colour. Ideally, headings should have a clear size scale, for both Google and users. While we are on the subject of styling: if you are an editor or are writing a post for a website, your job is to mark up the headings in the body text correctly, from h2 to h3. In general, I recommend using h2 and h3 headings almost exclusively, unless the article is very long. WordPress and other systems then let you change the font size, style and colour. Don’t do it! Ideally, keep everything in the default setting.

The best advice is still to have one main h1 heading. This is the heading outside the article body. After that, use mainly h2 and h3. Strictly following the hierarchy may be unnecessary pedantry. My own rule is that the first heading in the article (apart from the h1 article title) is an h2, placed below a short introductory paragraph that outlines the topic and structure.

After that, I place headings according to the structure of the text. When I have two main topics, each split in two, I use h3 within each topic and introduce the main topic blocks with h2. I use h4 headings only in really long articles and do not use the others at all. From a search engine point of view, the h2 and h3 headings are what really matter, and this is also where you should place keywords appropriately.

!!! Do not copy articles or parts of articles, as this technique will certainly cause you serious harm sooner or later. What’s more, many tools can now show where content was copied from and what percentage was copied. Authors who copy too much text will not last long in the field !!!

2. When linking internally, and especially externally, do not link using the article’s main keyword as the anchor text. This applies when you do not want to support the linked article for that keyword and you also aim to appear in search engines for that keyword yourself. To repeat: if you want to rank in a search engine for a particular keyword, no link anywhere in the article should use that keyword, and above all not one pointing to a competitor. By linking, you pass link juice to the linked page.

Don’t be afraid to link to highly relevant, good posts on authoritative websites that are not your competitors. To explain a term, feel free to link to Wikipedia or to an article on iDnes.

How to start an article or post in WordPress, step by step

You log in to the WordPress admin through the address bar at the top, where the website URL is. Simply go to the website and, after the base domain and a slash, type /wp-admin or /admin.

In WordPress terminology, “article” and “post” are synonyms and refer to the same thing. “Blog article” is the easier term to understand, but in the WordPress admin you will see the term “Posts”. Besides posts themselves, you can create categories and tags, which are used to divide and organise content. So if someone asks you to write a blog article, they are asking you to “Add a post”.

The new WordPress is built on blocks. You add blocks using the + sign in a circle (square). Most authors manage with text, heading and image blocks, but WordPress offers far more. I can definitely recommend lists, which are clear for users and break up the text nicely. An odd number of list items (3, 5, 7) is much more visually appealing to the human eye.

Write the text directly in WordPress (don’t copy it from text editors) and check the preview from time to time. At the very least, always check the article once you have finished writing it. You may find, for example, that an image is badly placed or that your paragraphs are too long.

If, on the other hand, you want to send users to a particular page and think a standard link is not prominent enough, use a CTA in the form of a button (always centre it). This is a more advanced technique, though, so don’t use it at the start. For example, something like this:

You can also use elements from the Yoast SEO plugin or other extensions, for example for creating smart tables. Tables can now also appear in search results.

The text of a post should all be aligned in one style. I recommend left alignment. Justified or centred alignment is less common and is not as readable or clear for users. If you are writing an article, it is best not to change the colour of headings or the alignment yourself. It is best to leave these as they are. The size of headings and text is also best left at the default settings. Any changes should be made globally across the whole website or blog.

Always edit the URL of an article or post before publishing it. Changing it after publication is not really recommended. Keep the so-called slug short rather than long, and keep it clear and containing keywords. Ideally, you should know the URLs of the key pages on your website.

How long should an article be?

You can find both answers to this question:

• An article should be as short and concise as possible!
• An article should be as long and comprehensive as possible!

Ideally, take something from both. At the start, roughly choose the keywords for which the article should appear. The article should then be structured so that the main answer to the search query comes under the first heading in the body of the article.

Put simply, the resolution or answer should not be at the very end, but near the top of the article. Also, always check what Google shows for the article’s main keyword and which search results it seems to favour most. This tells you more about what kind of content to create.

For the online world, it is good to write articles that are very comprehensive and structured roughly like this:

• Introduction
• Main result or message of the article
• Supporting information
• Related information
• Conclusion

TIP: Longer articles should have anchors that take readers straight to the part of the article they are interested in. It is better to add these automatically across the whole website than to add them one by one in the body text when writing articles.

Common mistakes that weaken a good blog post

Even experienced writers fall into the same traps. Watch out for these:

• A long introduction. Readers leave if they have to scroll through background before they reach the point.
• Writing for yourself. Jargon and assumed knowledge make the article hard to follow for anyone outside your field.
• General advice without examples. A specific example, screenshot or short case is easier to remember than an abstract tip.
• No clear next step. Tell the reader what to do with what they have just learned.
• Publishing straight away. Leave the draft for a few hours or a day. You will spot weak sentences and gaps much faster with fresh eyes.

How to write an engaging blog post

An engaging article reads like a conversation. Address the reader directly, mix short sentences with longer ones and replace vague claims with concrete details. Questions, brief stories from practice and honest opinions also keep people reading, because they show there is a real person behind the text.

Frequently asked questions about how to write a blog post

How do you write a good blog post?

Start with one clear reader and one question you want to answer. Give the answer early, then support it with examples and practical detail. Break the text up with headings and lists, and edit the draft at least once before you publish it.

How do you write a blog post outline?

Write the main message of the article in one sentence, then list the questions your reader is likely to ask. Group related questions under headings and add a few bullet points to each. If the headings make sense when you read them on their own, the outline is ready.

What is the difference between a good and a great blog post?

A good post answers the reader’s question correctly. A great one adds something that is hard to find elsewhere, such as first-hand experience, original examples or a clearer explanation. It is also easy to scan and kept up to date.

How do you write an engaging blog post?

Write in the second person and keep the tone conversational. Use concrete examples, short stories and clear opinions instead of general statements. Vary your sentence length so the text has a natural rhythm.