The elements of a blog post are so much more important than just how they look on the screen. Understanding what makes a great title, subheading, and paragraph means you need to consider both the reader’s experience and the best search engine optimisation practices.

SEO was probably my steepest learning curve when it came to understanding how to launch a blog, and I’ll be honest, I made a lot of mistakes in my first few posts. There are so many things to consider:

• Keywords
• Quality content
• Word count
• Linking
• Backlinks
• Topic pillars

And that’s just to name a few!

After 6 months of posting to this blog and 70+ blog posts, I’ve now got a pretty good handle on the best way to format blog post elements for SEO. I’ve put those lessons into this post to make SEO for beginner bloggers as simple as possible!

Keep reading to learn:

1. Why SEO Matters for Blogs
2. Basic Rules of Blog SEO
3. Elements of a Blog
   1. Title
   2. Intro
   3. Table of Contents
   4. Subheadings
   5. Paragraphs
   6. Summary
   7. Call To Action
   8. Internal and External Links
   9. Images
   10. Meta Data
4. Put It Into Practice

Why SEO Matters for Blogs

SEO, search engine optimisation, is the process of giving your blog post the best possible chance to get a high-ranking search result. It’s a series of best practices that help tell search engines like Google what your post is about and why it’s high-quality content.

Blog posts are not automatically listed on Google or other search engines – you have to use SEO first! With a high-quality and consistent SEO strategy, your blog post will get a higher search engine ranking and reach more people.

The more times and higher up your blog post appears in search engines, the more clicks your blog is going to get! This means a bigger audience, higher traffic, and greater potential for your website.

Basic Rules of Blog SEO

SEO is complicated. To help beginners with some of the basics, I’ve created this list of the five most important SEO rules to know before posting any blog:

1. Do keyword research: If you want a post to get a lot of engagement, it needs to provide information that an audience actually wants. Use free tools like Ahrefs, Google Search Console, and Moz to explore what versions of a topic and phrases are most searched for. These will be your keywords.
2. Prioritise readability: Keep your paragraphs short and use sub-headings to split up information. Search engines don’t use real people to rate your post but bots that crawl pages for information. You want to split the post into parts so that these bots can understand the text and know how to sort the information for search results.
3. Content is king: Nothing can replace high-quality content that actually informs readers and is related to the keywords. Blog posts should be a minimum of 800 words, but ideally closer to 1500 – 3000 when possible!
4. Linking matters: One of the main factors search engines use to rank your blog post is if other websites think it’s good content. They do this by counting the number of websites that link to your post, and the more established a backlinking website is, the better it is for your site.
5. Don’t try to trick the bots: Overusing keywords or including keywords irrelevant to your content will hurt your search engine ranking. You need to prove to the bots that your content is human-written (not AI) using personal experience and unique wording – all of which is related to your keywords and blog niche.

Elements of a Blog

Good blog SEO can be made simple using elements. Once you understand the elements that make up a successful blog, it becomes easier to write and format your content. Use this guide as a template for your next post:

Title

This should be between 8 and 12 words or around 60 characters. You want to have your main keyword included, ideally at the start of the title. Try and make the title interesting using a mix of emotional, descriptive, and unique words.

Intro

Open your post with a 150 – 200 word introduction. If possible, use your keyword in the opening sentence but only if it sounds natural and not forced! The intro should explain what the post is about and give a taste of what’s to come.

It can be great to have some sort of personal story or flair to the intro to tell the search engine bots that there’s a real person behind the post!

You should also aim to include at least one internal link in the intro to another one of your posts.

Table of Contents

A contents table is helpful for navigating your post and gives some sneaky internal jump links to the content which search engines love to see. It can also be a great place to naturally insert keywords and gives bots a summary of content.

Subheadings

One of the most important SEO blog post elements! Subheadings break the page into parts and organise information by importance. Typically you will use three types of subheadings.

Subheading 1 is for the title only.

Subheading 2 is for the main subjects in a post.

Subheading 3 is to break up each subject into parts.

E.g. on this blog post:

Subheading 1 is ‘Elements of a Blog Post: SEO Formatting for Beginners’.

Subheading 2 are Why SEO Matters for Blogs, Basic Rules of Blog SEO, and Elements of a Blog.

Subheading 3 is used for the individual elements.

Paragraphs

Paragraphs should be kept at 2-3 sentences at most to prioritise readability. You can bold the most important information but keep it to a few words at a time and no more than one bold sentence per paragraph.

Summary

You want to close out the post with a 150 – 200 word conclusion that draws the topic to a close. This is another great opportunity to insert a personal reflection or opinion to show bots that the post is written by a real writer (there’s an irony in there somewhere).

Call To Action

Every post should finish with a call to action, usually referred to as the CTA. This is to keep the reader engaged with your content by asking them to do something before leaving your site. Good CTAs are:

• Asking the reader to leave a like or comment
• Directing the audience to your email subscription box
• Adding a read more button with other posts they might want to look at

Internal and External Links

As mentioned before, there is a lot of power in the links you use in an article. There are two types:

Internal links: These are links to other posts or pages on your blog. You want to have at least 2-3 internal links per post to invite a reader to keep exploring your blog. This is also great for telling bots how your blog is designed and the niche your website falls into.

External links: To sites outside of your own. Believe it or not, linking externally to reputable sites also helps your SEO! This is because it tells search engines that your information is legitimate and well-researched. Try to have at least 1 external link per post.

Images

Relevant images are another great SEO practice. Although bots can’t actually ‘see’ the images, they will read the image’s name, description, and alt text (a description of what the image shows). You should use these as a chance to input your keywords.

Meta Data

There are two main types of metadata:

Meta Title: The webpage name shown on the search engine results list. This should be a shorter version of the post title that is eye-catching and includes keywords. Keep it between 50 and 60 characters.

Meta Description: A summary of what your post is about. Aim to use an imperative to engage a reader like ‘Learn how to…’ or ‘Discover the secret to…’ and don’t just rehash what the title already says. The meta description should be between 145 and 150 characters.

Put It Into Practice

Now that you know the basics of blog SEO and blog elements, all that’s left to do is put it into practice! The more posts you write, the better your SEO knowledge is going to get. I know it can feel like a lot at the start – I’ve been there – but over time implementing these SEO best practices becomes like second nature.

If you need an extra helping hand, try checking out my Easy SEO Blog Checklist for New Bloggers to make sure there isn’t anything you’ve missed before publishing a post!