To succeed in content marketing, you need to learn how to create a blog effectively. Like it or not, blogging is an important aspect of digital marketing and if you want to build a strong online presence, you should be able to create a blog in a fast and effective way. I know that beginners for SEO or Digital Marketing find it difficult to understand the value of a blog and how it can help solo bloggers or businesses grow online but that doesn't change the facts. Many people make a living from blogging, others use it as a way to get higher rankings on search results, retailers use it to promote their products and online stores.

How to Create a Successful Blog with 10 SEO Steps

If you think for a moment what the Internet really is, you will realize that most of it are just a collection of blogs in the form of text, images or videos. Go to Google or Bing and search for the keywords you want and see the results. Most of them point to Good blog posts on personal blogs, company blogs or online publications. In short, if you can produce good content quickly, with the right plan and SEO strategy, you can get a part of the search regardless of competition or difficulty.

 And this is precisely the purpose of this post. To help you understand what effective blogging is and how to become a successful blogger. The following explains how to create a successful blog with 10 SEO steps that must be followed to start blogging effectively:
  • Step 1: Determine your blogging goals
  • Step 2: Do your research before you start writing
  • Step 3: Choose the title of your post wisely
  • Step 4: Outline the posts
  • Step 5: Write the introduction
  • Step 6: Size does not count (post length)
  • Step 7: Learn basic SEO principles on the page
  • Step 8: Beautify your work
  • Step 9: Get your blog noticed
  • Step 10: Build consistency

Step 1: Determine your blogging goals

Why blog? What is the purpose of having a blog?
This might sound obvious but many times people start blogs for the sake of having a blog without really thinking about what they want to achieve from their blogging efforts.
Some examples of good blogging goals:

Blogging for money

This is a popular one. You start a blog, publish great content, get traffic and then make money using AdSense, affiliate marketing or others.
Sounds like a statement dating from the 90s but it still works and that is one of the most popular ways to utilize a blog.
Those who still find it hard to believe, don't forget that this is how HuffingtonPost, Mashable, and other large web sites start at an early stage.

Blogging for prospects

Whether you sell products or services online (or offline), blogging is one of the most effective ways to generate leads.
Through blogging, you can 'communicate' with your potential customers, convince them of the effectiveness of your product or service and win that sale.
Want to increase brand awareness by generating more traffic to your website?
Ask the experts to answer this question and you will see that they all agree that blogging is the way to go.

 The two examples above cover almost all blogging goals but what is important for you to do before entering into blogging is to decide on your main goal because this can change your approach.

 As an example:
  • If you make a blog for money, then you need to concentrate more on publishing content related to keywords that can make you money (‘buy keywords’)
  • If you create a blog for prospects, then you should publish posts that are insightful and detailed to guide readers in making decisions
  • If you create a blog for traffic, you need to blog more often and on trending topics.

Step 2: Do your research before you start writing

The most time-consuming part of blogging is clearly the process of creating content (ie writing), before that and to make writing easier, you need to do some research.
Think about your blog's topic and search on Google using various related keywords
What you want to know at this stage is what other people write about the topic. What titles they use, what kind of content and generally what Google considers good content for the topic.

 Take a few minutes and analyze the results on page 1 of Google, open the website in a new tab and read the blog.
Are there similarities in content? Do you pay attention to certain patterns?
Remember that your goal is to make your blog better and it's time to start thinking about ways to distinguish your content from what has already been published on the same subject.

 If you find something you like that is a particular header, reference or point, open a new document and start taking notes.

Step 3: Choose the title of your post wisely

Now that you have a good idea of what was written about the topic, your next task is to create a title. Your title should ideally serve two purposes: be attractive so users want to click and read and SEO friendly so you have more opportunities to achieve higher rankings. Here's how I chose my title: After I decided on the general keywords that I wanted to target in my article, I started searching Google for certain keywords and noted the suggestions Google gave when typing in the search box and 'Related Searches' displayed at the end. . from each page. I then take the most related ones and examine them in SEMRush to find out their difficulties and other similar long-tail keywords. 

 Read the section on keyword research in my SEMRUSH review for an example. The next step is to narrow my choice to one or two candidates and then I begin to think about how the actual title will look. For example consider this: Common keywords: "SEO Tips" long-tail key: "SEO Tips for Beginners" Article title: "15 SEO Tips for Beginners to rank Google higher" Important The final step before making a final decision is to do another search on Google using the full title. What I want to know is what type of website ranking the title and especially their domain authority (Hint: using SEMRush). If the first position is occupied by high authority and the website is very large, this narrows down the possibility of my blog posts to achieve good rankings regardless of how well I can create content me. I know this sounds confusing (more experienced can understand what I mean), but it's important to invest your blogging time in titles or keywords that you can get traffic. If so, then I further change the title by changing or adding words so I have to compete with websites that lack authority.

Step 4: Make an outline of the post

After the title is ready and optimized, it is time to outline the posts. Broadly speaking, we intend to decide for a different title from the blog post and what will be discussed by each section of the blog. Making a good outline from the beginning will save you a lot of time later because all you have to do after that is to create content for each heading. to write 500 words to cover subtitles instead of trying to write 3000 words without end. Depending on the length of the post, you can have a different title ideally for every 500 words. This also makes reading easier especially for those who like to read skim.

Step 5: Write the introduction

A Greek philosopher once said that "A good start is half done" and this is true when writing an introduction to your blog. After you write an introduction and get the ball rolling, the rest runs faster and smoother (provided of course you know your topic and have an idea good about what should be written in the body of the article). When I write the introduction for my blog post, I try to make it short (2-3 lines) and explain what it is. I know that this is not my strongest point but I try to improve by continuing to experiment with various ways of writing the introduction. 

 Certainly, it took me a good time but after the introduction is ready, the contents of the post are easier to write (especially if you have made a good outline as explained in step 4). What is good to do in your introduction is adding your keywords (or related) in the first 160 characters of the post but without do keyword stuffing or make sentences that don't make sense. For example, see the introduction to this post and notice how I add my target keywords "how to blog effectively" in the first sentence. I also tend to use the introductory section as a meta description of the page so that the time needed to write an introduction server for this purpose as well.

Step 6: Size does not matter (post length)

Size is important. Many studies and surveys show that longer posts perform better in search, socially (they are more shareable, preferable) but also on different publishing platforms, i.e. linked to posts or Buzzfeed. Word Count and Backlinks article Many people ask, okay longer is better but how long is the blog post? The simplest answer is to search Google for similar articles and count the number of words from each blog post that appears on the first page of Google. 

 This may not be a scientific way to find out the ideal word length for your topic, but it is an easy way to find out what you want. Google. Count the average number of words and make your words longer and deeper as long as it makes sense and you have something to say that will add real value to the content.

Step 7: Learn the basic SEO principles on the page

SEO is a very big subject but when it comes to article writing, you don't need to be an SEO expert to get the basics right. All you need is to familiarize yourself with the basic SEO concepts on the page. Review the On-page SEO SEO on the page is nothing but a set of rules that you can apply to your content to be more friendly with bots and search engine users.

 Things like:
  • The title is less than 60 characters
  • Descriptions between 140-150 characters
  • ALT tags for images
  • H1 tags for page titles and H2, H3 tags for titles
  • Set a Canonical URL for the page
  • A well-formed permanent URL
  • Load pages quickly
  • Mobile-friendly content
  • Internal links
  • Implementation of Structured Data is important to make your content indexed and understood by search engines.

Step 8: Beautify Your Posts

You make an interesting title and write a good post, what next? Your work isn't finished. Throwing words (even if they are quality words) on the page won't get you far. All you need to do is make sure that your post looks good too. Use bold and italics to highlight important points, make subheadings larger, make links easily recognizable, add images if you can use them to display statistics or highlight points, add external links to help users learn more about a subject (or verify statistics or studies). All of these little things can make your posts easier to read, more professional, more social and can even make readers take longer to the page and actually read the article because they like what they see.

Step 9: Create Attraction So that Your Blog is noticed

Let's face it, you can't be a successful blogger or run a successful website if no one reads, shares, and comments on your posts. It feels bad to spend hours preparing your posts and ending up in the internet trash. What can you do about this? The encouraging news is that they are proven ways to get your blog noticed. You can use advertising, social media, guest posting, content distribution, email marketing and many other methods to get your written masterpiece in front of many people. Don't consider blog promotion as an option, but something that 'you must do' as part of your blogging process. Unless you already have a large audience and followers, no one will care about your new post until you bring it in front of their screen.

 As soon as you press publish, make a list of actions to take such as:
  • Share posts on your social media business page
  • Share posts (several times) on your personal social media page
  • Posts on content discovery sites
  • Advertise on Facebook (use Facebook ads)
  • Advertise on Twitter (use Twitter promotional ads)
  • Send to stumble
  • Inform other fellow bloggers via email that you have published a new post.
  • Update your Android or iPhone application and notify users
  • Send newsletters to your email list

Step 10: Build consistency

Consistency will help you make results (e.g. Traffic) to your blog faster. I am not too consistent in publishing new content for this blog and that is why traffic increases at a low level, but on other blogs, I do this regularly, then traffic has reached more than 10,000 thousand visits per day. There are some rules that must be followed regarding how often you should publish new content but as a general guide, updated websites or blogs with fresh, unique and relevant content perform better (in many aspects) than other websites.

 Search engines and platforms social media is constantly looking for new content (this is what their readers want) and giving them what they want, you increase your chances of getting attention both organically and socially. The latest thoughts and lessons learned from Blogging are important processes in Digital Marketing. Users, search engines, social platforms, content networks need new content all the time. Good content takes a lot of time to create so it's important to be in a position to produce good content quickly. If you can't do it quickly then the costs are high (even if you only count your own hours) and make it an unprofitable task.

Ansar Zainuddin