13 On Page Blog SEO Steps for Top Rankings

Updated on December 18th, 2023

The ultimate sign of a successful blog is tons of organic traffic coming from search engines. And that happens when the blog SEO is done right, and being done regularly to maintain the top positions. This post covers the steps to do the best Blog SEO that gets fast results. Let’s get started.

There are two parts to SEO: Off-page and on-page. Off-page refers to the inbound links pointing to your website. And on-page refers to the keywords and content of your site, the META tags defined on each page of your site, the structure and layout of your site, its categories, the interlinking of pages within your site, and your site’s outbound links.

While much focus has been placed on the negative impact of low-quality off-page SEO tactics aimed at manipulating search engine rankings, it is equally crucial to prioritize on-page SEO for your blog. Optimizing your blog for SEO is essential for achieving favorable rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Here’s a list of 14 essential on-page Blog SEO techniques and questions you should be asking yourself about each and every single blog post page on your site:

1. Is your blogpost URL search engine friendly?

When crawling your blog, one of most important data points a search engine gathers about each page and blogpost is its URL. The URL structure for blogs is crucial for search engine indexing and ranking. The length of the URL, whether or not the URL contains intelligible words, and whether those words pertain to the topic of that page’s content, are all factors that play into determining how well your site gets indexed and ranked in the SERPS. URLs should be concise and should contain either a keyword that pertains to the body or could even spell out the title of the blog post page itself. WordPress and Blogger make this easy and automatic for you, through the use of permalinks, slug or “permanent links”.

 2. Does your post’s first paragraph have focus keyword?

Relevance is the name of the game when getting indexed and ranked. Search engines will frequently display content from the first paragraph of your blogpost on the search results page. Make it compelling, contextually relevant, and strategically incorporate focus keywords (without excessive stuffing). This includes using keywords in blogs and conducting effective keyword research for blog optimization.

Recommended read – How to do smart Keyword research – step by step

 3. Are you interlinking your posts?

Internal linking plays a crucial role in the blog SEO. It’s not just external backlinks that matter to search engines like Google, but also the internal link structure within your blog posts. By strategically linking relevant blog posts, you can enhance the user experience for your blogs and provide contextually relevant information. Since search engines like Google view contextually relevant backlinks in a favorable light, why can’t these links come from your relevant blog posts?

Linking newer blog posts back to old, relevant posts is nothing short of an extremely effective way to pass link juice and PR to pages within your site. It also signals to the search engines that your site is being updated with fresh content, which promotes more frequent crawling and regular traffic. 

4. Do you use outbound links? (Only relevant and of  high authority)

One of the greatest SEO myths is that linking out to other websites somehow devalues your own site’s page rank and authority. However, the truth is that search engines favor outbound links, especially if those links are to other blogs and sites that are relevant, and are of higher authority. Why?

Because this sends a signal to Google that your website is aimed at delivering value to your readers. And if you include a link to a valuable site from yours, Google believes your site should be rewarded for it.

5. Are you using LSI for your post content?

When it comes to optimizing blog content, the strategy of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) plays a crucial role. This refers to the strategy of diversifying your keyword usage within a single web page. The old strategy of optimizing your page for a single page no longer holds the same weight as it once used to. Search engines, such as Google, are now giving more weight to pages that contain a diverse collection of keywords that are related to the primary keyword.

In plain English, this means that you intersperse synonyms of your primary keywords within your post content, as opposed to excessively overstuffing your page with the same keyword too many times so as to come across as unnatural or unreadable.

For example, LSI for this blogpost can have variables like; SEO for blogs, onpage blog SEO, SEO techniques for blogs and so on.

 6. Are you being conscious of your post’s word count?

Fixation with word counts is yet another one of the biggest myths of SEO. There is no evidence to support the assertion that a piece of content on the Internet must be a minimum word length in order to achieve favourable rankings in the SERPS.

When it comes to word count, let’s set the record straight: size doesn’t matter. Quality trumps quantity. It’s okay for an article to be short (less than 500 words, according to the conventional definition of a “short” article), as long as it contains quality content, gets the point across, and it is optimized properly. Focus on quality over quantity for blog post length and SEO success.

 7. Are you making good use of header tags?

Content that is broken down into sections is a lot easier to read and digest not only by humans, but it makes it easier for search engine crawlers to digest, index, and rank content. Optimize your blog’s readability and search engine visibility by utilizing heading tags for blogs. Make sure your content is broken down into sections that are partitioned by keyword-optimized header tags. By header tags, we mean the <H1>, <H2>, <H3>… <Hn> tags used to format blocks of text to make them larger and bolder for greater emphasis and visual impact. (We recommend using <H1>, H2 and <H3> tags for maximum effect.) Maximize the impact of your blog categories and tags with proper optimization.

 8. Did you optimize your images?

If you’ve got images embedded within your blog posts, then these are fair game for SEO as well. Make sure they are appropriately sized so as to optimize your blog site’s loading speed. Configure them with the ALT tag, which is where you can put descriptive keyword-rich text that gets indexed by the search engines. Many search engines now have the capability to return images in their search results. So why not take advantage of this and maximize your site’s exposure? Boost your blog’s visibility with effective image optimization for blogs.

And to make life easier for users of WordPress, there are even plugins that will automate the job of optimizing your images for maximum performance:

• WP Smush It – compresses and converts images into formats that take up less of a footprint, thus improving image load times.
• CW Image Optimizer – Based on WP Smush It, but does the conversion locally as opposed to at a third party site.

9. Have you optimized your page for load speed?

For blog SEO, site speed plays a crucial role. When Google crawls your website, it assesses the loading speed of your pages. When Google crawls your website, one of the metrics it gathers is the speed at which your pages load. Loading under 3 seconds affects the rankings positively. Google Webmaster Tools offers a feature that analyzes your site’s load speed and offers very poignant and specific recommendations on how to improve it. Look for the Page Speed tool within Google Webmaster Tools.

10. Do your outbound links represent a diverse mixture of nofollow vs dofollow links?

One of the biggest pitfalls of the pre-Penguin and pre-Panda world was to fall into the trap of believing that all of your outbound links should be nofollow, so as to preserve “link juice”, based on the fallacious premise that this would devalue your own blog’s page rank. Since Google now has made it abundantly clear that they prefer sites to have a natural backlink profile, it pays to have both dofollow as well as nofollow outbound links from your website.

11. Does your page or post has Meta Data?

While there is much controversy as to whether and how much weight META tags carry in today’s world of SEO, the fact of the matter remains that they do bear some impact to your page’s overall SEO, though it does not influence it as much as it used to.

Adding appropriate META TITLE, a META DESCRIPTION, and a META FOCUS KEYWORD tag will help the search engines identify, tag, and index your site more efficiently as well as boost your click-through rate rate. In fact, if you are running a news website and wish to have Google consider your blog posts for inclusion in Google News, you should make use of the STANDOUT meta tag. Optimize your blogs titles along with effective meta descriptions and meta tags.

12. Are you using a “show related posts” plugin?

As a corollary to #3 above, as it pertains to interlinking within the blog, if you are using a CMS such as WordPress, then it is highly recommended that you automate the process of internal backlinking by using a “show related posts” plugin, that will automatically display posts that are related by category or tag. This will increase the amount of time that visitors will stay on your website, thus help engage the user better and thereby increase your blog’s conversion rates.

13. Does it allow social sharing?

Sharing your sites on social networks adds a new dimension to your SEO strategy. If they aren’t already doing so, each page or post on your blog should include a toolbar with buttons that let you share it on the social network of your choice: Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, Digg, among others.

If your blog post page can answer these 13 on page SEO questions, then you will be in good shape to maximize your position in the SERPs.

Can you think of any other important blog on page SEO questions? If so, feel free to share your comments below. I’d like to hear from you.