How to Write an SEO Optimized Blog Post

Since the birth and rise of search engines, optimized content has been important. It used to be difficult to really know and understand what search engines wanted to see. When there was less content on the web, people didn’t think much about competing for eyes. But as of 2025, millions of terabytes of data is being published to the internet every single day. Since 2012, it’s believed that the internet has doubled in size every single day. And believe it or not, blogging is still a popular way to publish and ingest content. Creating an SEO optimized blog is one of the best ways to take advantage of that reality. 

Think about it – when you have a problem or a question and you google it, you often end up on a blog post. Blogging has and still is one of the most powerful tools when it comes to building an SEO strategy and getting your content seen by more people. But what makes a post optimized?

We’ll walk through exactly what it means to plan and write an SEO optimized blog post. I’ll use the post you’re reading right now as an example (If you want to learn more about SEO as a whole, review this beginners breakdown).

What Makes an SEO Optimized Blog Post?

The foundation of the Google search algorithm originates in academia. The concept of PageRank, which is a key component of Google’s ranking algorithm, was developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin during their doctoral studies at Stanford University. You can actually read their paper, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” which outlines the concept that is the foundation of the Google search algorithm.  

Basically, Google likes when your content looks like an essay. Not just any essay – a good one!  It should be a strong and easy to understand method for communicating information that people actually want.  

Remember that SEO optimized content isn’t content made just to game a system. The #1 thing to aim for is to make sure your content is actually helpful.

That being said, a blog post that is helpfully optimized for SEO should meet certain criteria. Not every post in your blog needs to be 100% optimized, but there are certain things you should shoot for.

Easy to Skim

It’s not typical for people to land on a blog post and want to read every single word. More often than not, they’ve found your post because they’re trying to answer a specific question, or they want to find the steps to follow in order to solve a problem. 

Your blog post should utilize a format that makes it easy for the reader to find the information they need quickly and easily. 

For example, this blog post uses plenty of subheadings and short sections of written content. That way, if you were looking for a certain answer, you can find it without needing to sort through a bunch of copy.

Targeted Toward Your Audience and Their Questions

If you’re launching an SEO optimized blog, usually you have a goal. You want to increase site traffic, increase rankings, earn conversions, etc. That means your content needs to complement the needs of the people whose traffic or conversions you want. Unless you’re publishing a blog for fun, it doesn’t make sense to spend time and energy just creating content that you want to publish. You have to prioritize the people who you want actually reading your content. 

For example, this post was written for you! We write our content for people who are fairly new to SEO and are interested in learning how to be better at SEO for their brand or business. Hopefully that’s you!

Utilizes the Right Keywords

You use keyword research in order to ensure that you’re actually writing the content people want to see. You’re missing opportunities when you guess about the kinds of topics to write about. Finding and strategizing around keywords makes sure that your blog is focused. Not only that, you can help increase the likelihood that if someone lands on one post, there will be other posts in your blog that will interest them.  

Google uses keyword focuses heavily when determining how to crawl and rank your content. So they aren’t just important for the human eye, but for how your content is handled by machines. For example, “SEO optimized blog” is our main keyword focus for this post. We’ve made sure that that phrase appears often. But we also did research using SEMRush.com to find related keywords that help flesh out the topic.

Connected Thoughtfully to Other Content

Google cares very much about the relationship between content. A blog post should be a part of a larger story. Linking your post to other posts, to other pages on your site, and to other websites shows that it’s a powerful and helpful part of the online community around that topic.

It’s important that you include links to facts you cite, websites you mention, and related pages that could help someone understand your topic better. 

For example, this post covers a basic topic. This topic connects to a lot of other ideas. In this post we link to sites that prove assertions we’ve made. We link to other posts in our blog that help give you a better understanding of DIY SEO, and we link to things like tools we mention. Google sees all those links and can learn more about this post’s intentions through those relationships.

Organized for Search Engine Bots

We’ll go over this more later on in the post. But the way a post is formatted matters. A well-formatted post is easy for people to read, but it also means that Google can understand information in your post more easily, too.

If this post was all just one long block of text without line breaks or subheadings, it would be impossible for you to read. And Google wouldn’t be able to understand how the content is organized. Google doesn’t want to serve unorganized or confusing content to people. So it prioritizes content that is built like a well-written essay. 

For example, I used an H2 heading format for the phrase above: “What Makes an SEO Optimized Blog Post?” Google knows that that is a key point of this post. The following H3 headings are sub-points within that initial point. Google understands that they’re related; that the H3 headings are supporting information to the H2. 

Now that you know what makes a blog post strategic, let’s take a step back and look at how to plan out multiple posts in a strategy.

How to Plan a Blogging Strategy

Writing posts as you think of them can work for you in the long run. There are tons of huge blogs online that have been populated with content over the years as needed. But those blogs take a long time to rank. If your goal is to rank more quickly and to serve content to people now, it’s important to develop an effective SEO content strategy.

Keyword Research

Earlier, we discussed researching topics and keywords you want to focus on. Let’s go deeper into that idea. You may sell custom mechanical keyboards for computers. What do you think people would search for that would lead them to you? The keyword “mechanical keyboards” seems like a good guess. But that’s a very general term. Using a tool like SEMRush.com, we can see that there is a lot of content out there around custom keyboards. It’s high-volume and determinedly difficult to rank for.

That doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Build something I like to call a keyword universe. “Mechanical Keyboards” is your sun. Find planets and moons you can surround it with. 

SEMRush gives you keyword variations and questions that are related to your main keyword. These are not as high-volume and their difficulty is much lower. If you can rank for these smaller more specific keywords, Google will begin to understand that all your content is about “mechanical keyboards.” And it will begin to see you as an expert in the world of all things related to mechanical keyboards. 

Make a Content Calendar for an SEO optimized blog

Now that you have some good information about your potential keyword focuses, you can create a calendar of content. 

Google likes seeing that you publish content fairly regularly. But it understands quality over quantity. Instead of posting as often as humanly possible, one post per week is a good rule of thumb if you can manage it. 

Looking at your keyword variations and questions, make a list of blog post topics you could write about. For example, I can look at our list above and generate the following potential blog post titles: 

• How to Clean a Mechanical Keyboard
• Best Mechanical Keyboards
• Mechanical Keyboards for Programming
• Pros and Cons of Wired and Wireless Keyboards

That’s one month’s worth of weekly content! Remember that human beings will be reading your content. So not every single piece of content needs to revolve only around mechanical keyboards. If your keyboards are often used for gaming, consider writing content about games. If you focus on ergonomic keyboards, write some content about how to make a workspace more ergonomic. These are all relevant, even if the title doesn’t specifically mention the words “mechanical keyboard.”

Report and Analyze

An important part of strategy is making sure you understand your results and improve over time. Once a month or once a quarter, document how your posts are performing. What kind of website traffic are you getting? Are people sharing or commenting on your posts? Have sales increased?

Use tools like Google Analytics to track how your blog strategy is working. If it’s not working, try new ideas. We highly recommend using a workbook to document your strategy as well as your results 

Now that you’re familiar with what goes into building a strategy, let’s talk some more about planning a specific SEO optimized blog post.

How to Plan an SEO Optimized Blog Post

Create an Outline

Remember outlining essays in school? The same general idea applies here. If you’re trying to publish posts that are as optimized as possible, it’s a good idea to create an outline. 

For example, here is the outline I started with for this blog post:

I started with my focus keyword: SEO Optimized Blog 

Since I know that many beginners will read this post, I wanted to answer some preliminary questions first. To write an SEO optimized blog post you have to know why you’re doing what you’re doing. I wanted to give a foundation and provide some background information before answering the question directly. I also know that you can’t just write posts without a strategy, so I wanted to make sure to explain that first. 

• H1: How to Write an SEO Optimized Blog Post
  • H2: What makes an SEO optimized blog post?
    • H3: Easy to skim
    • H3: Targeted toward your audience
    • H3: Utilizes the right keywords
    • H3: Connected to other content
    • H3: Organized for bots
  • H2: How to Plan a Blogging Strategy
    • H3: Keyword research
    • H3: Make a content calendar for an SEO optimized blog
    • H3: Report and analyze
  • H2: How to Plan an SEO Optimized Blog Post
    • H3: Write an outline
    • H3: Finalizing the post
  • H2: Checklist

My outline includes my H2 and H3 subheadings, each as a bullet point. The H2s are questions, and the H3s are their answers. I wrote in order, fleshing out each point as I wrote.

Important to note: Don’t be afraid to pivot. It’s more important that you make sense than that you stick to an outline exactly.

Finalizing the Post

After writing the first draft of the post, I go back to polish the formatting and optimization.

1. Proofread for spelling, grammar, and clarity.
2. Make sure that the subheadings make sense.
3. Format lists, add links, and add images. 

Finally, I put the entire thing into WordPress, the content management system through which we publish our content. We use a plugin called Yoast. It scores your content based on what your focus keyword is. It’s helpful because it tells you exactly what you can do to improve your SEO optimization.

When I first added my focus keyword, it scored the post as “just okay.” The orange not-so-smiley faces told me I have some work to do when it comes to SEO and readability.

Yoast will tell me all the things I could be doing to improve. And once I addressed them, I got the smiley faces to turn green. This tells me that this post is more or less “fully” optimized.

As I said before, it’s not essential that each one of your posts accounts for every single one of these items. But they help you build good SEO habits to make sure your posts are as high quality as they can be.

Checklist for an SEO Optimized Blog Post 

Before publishing a blog post, I recommend you review this checklist. It will remind you of all the content and formatting-centric things you can do to make a post easier for both humans and Google to read. 

Need help optimizing your blog for SEO? SEO Pro Geeks can help.