I really believe that startup founders can and should write to their own blog, I’m positive that they have lots of valuable insights to share with the community – the problem is that many times, I see startup founders hit by sudden inspiration, setting off to write a blog post that ends up being 250 words of lost non-optimized potential because they don’t consider search engine optimization and don’t know how to optimize blog posts for SEO. The good news? This can be cured with a few blog SEO guidelines that will help make sure Google acknowledges the post and the target audience gains the most of it.

Last month one of our client had one of this moment and this inspired me to put together a quick post with guidelines explaining how to write SEO friendly blog posts.

With that said, let’s dive in When writing blog content here are 2 main rules of thumb that it’s important to follow:

1. Provide great, educative and elaborative content

Practicality, in order to do so – it’s important to follow the following rules:

• an Article has to contain at least 700-1000 words – anything below that is considered low-value content by Google
• Use external references to establish the authority of your content and improve the user experience. A of thumb for choosing valuable references is to include ones that appear on the first page of Google under the relevant topic at hand.
• Look at what your competitors are doing – Google the topic you want to write about and review the 1-3 results. This will provide a strong indication for what Google considers good content. Things to pay attention to:
  • Type – do the results lead to a company homepage/ services page/a blog post?
  • The content length
  • Subheadings – the subheadings among the results can provide you with an initial structure to rely on. Obviously, nothing is set in stone, if you believe that your structure is better to work with it.
• It’s recommended to add images or videos to increase the dwell time and scrolling. Make sure to compress the images to decrease the page loading speed time. You can use free third party tools such as Tinypng to do so.

2. Make sure you’re indicating the context to Google in a way the Google algorithm can understand it :)

• Contain LSI (latent semantic indexing) words – those are basically keywords that are semantically related to your primary keyword. Contrary to popular belief, these are NOT just synonym or keywords that are similar in meaning. In a nutshell, LSI keywords are based on user search patterns and behavior, how one keyword search is usually linked to another keyword search. Including LSI keywords in your text helps the Google algorithm understand the article’s main topic and rank the content accordingly. You should use these words all over the article, paragraphs, subheading etc – you can find LSI keywords using this tool. As a meta example, the main keyword for this blog post is “blog SEO guidelines”. USing the LSI keywords tool I found that I should include the following keywords along this post and thus if you look carefully, you’ll find ones that I thought would fit well along this text (next force words out of context):

• Always include the main keyword in the article’s title and first paragraph.
• If your blog is on WordPress, make sure to use the Yoast plugin. At, the bottom of every blog you’ll see Yoast fields that provide you insights about your writing and the SEO. Here’s what it looks like:

Image credit: Yoast

most important rule – write for the people not for Google’s algorithm. At the end of the day Google measures the user experience (bounce rate, shares etc) and not the keywords density. Obviously, these rules are suggestions only, following them doesn’t guarantee ranking or traffic, but it definitely increases the chances of success.