Writing the best SEO-friendly guest posts is not always an easy task for a blogger.
Do you want your guest posts to be accepted and published quickly? There is a way if you know how to make them the best SEO-friendly guest posts they receive.
Many times, I have received guest posts and wondered if they had any SEO practice. The post comes in with long-running sentences. There are the never-ending paragraphs that can lull you into a deep sleep. I’ve had to edit and re-edit and re-write.
I’ve learned a lot having the YOAST SEO plugin premium for over a year now. Yoast guides me along the way with each post on how to adjust for the best SEO. It doesn’t necessarily help with outbound and inbound links, but it does with interlinking and everything else.
There is also a free SEO tool version of the plugin too. It’s a great tool for anyone who needs help crafting their best SEO-friendly guest posts.
I’ve also learned a few things from the Mistaken Man’s blog. Palesh often writes about the importance of SEO for your blogging survival.
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Best SEO-Friendly Guest Posts: Setting Up Your Headers
Not only are headers a key factor for the best SEO-friendly posts but they give you readers a way to glance at a post. They can easily skim paragraphs or read your posts easier on their mobile device.
The title is the h1 header and the first sentence should include a header with h2 tags. From there you can use h3 and even h4 headers.
The larger the header number the small the text is. Each of these header types gives you text a boldface type. Google loves seeing these headers on your blog!
Passive Voice for Your SEO
Your passive voice should be no more than 10% in your blog posts. What is this Passive Voice?
According to Wikipedia, it is: “The passive voice is a grammatical “voice“. The noun or a noun phrase that would be the object of a corresponding active sentence (such as “Our troops defeated the enemy”) appears as the subject of a sentence or clause in the passive voice (“The enemy was defeated by our troops”).
Sometimes I struggle with this one but once against Yoast is to the rescue!
Shorter Sentences/Paragraphs for Best SEO Friendly Guest Posts
One of the best things about Yoast is it gives you word count and signals when you go over 300 words in a paragraph. It also shows you a readability score as you write your post.
You can see the example below of their Flesch Reading Ease test which this post so far passed. √
Yoast will tell you if your sentences are too long or just right. Keep in mind you need to be writing at a 6th to a 9th-grade reading level so many can understand your content.
If your content is too complicated many readers may quickly leave your website or blog.
Keep in mind you need to be writing at a 6th to a 9th-grade reading level so many can understand your content. #guestposts #bloggingtips
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Length of the Posts for the Best SEO Friendliness Do Matter!
SEO-friendly posts now should be around 900 words long. When I first started in this blogging adventure it was 300 words. A few years back it went to 500 words per post.
Now it takes at least 900 words to be the best SEO-friendly post there can be.
Of course, many experts recommend 2500+ words are needed to be ranked high via the almighty Google. Some even proclaim that 3,500 is the new optimal word count for a blog post.
These longer-form blog posts do rank better in search according to several research studies online.
It really depends on your subject matter and ways of presenting it for your own blog post. Now, if you want to do blogger outreach correctly, you’ll make sure it’s a great lengthy piece.
Interlinking Your Posts to Others
If you are going to contribute to another blog be sure to interlink your post to their older posts on their site. This is a given. Many bloggers are takers. You must be a giver to become successful as Ryan Biddulph preaches about.
He submitted a guest post to my site this past year and he did the interlinking for me. Nice! Less editing and I could publish asap. Ryan is also a genius on Facebook video and he shared how you can become one too.
Google loves when you interlink content on your site. Internal linking strengthens the overall search-optimized value of a website. Be sure to use natural wording when you link.
Therefore don’t only link “read about SEO” when you link to a page about social media, etc. It is also not good to always link to your home page or contact me page. (top-level pages, etc.) If you leave pages or posts unlinked they will become orphaned content.
Another tip: Don’t link to another post on the same subject. It will make it difficult for Google to know which page or post is MORE important.
The anchor text must make complete sense when you link something on the best SEO-friendly post! Kissmetrics did a great job explaining this in a post recently if you want to delve deeper into proper internal linking.
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Focused Keywords the Best SEO Friendly Guest Posts
You must be careful when writing the best SEO-friendly posts to your favorite blog that you don’t use the same focus keywords they have used. Always ask if you are not sure.
This can make it difficult for Google or Bing to know which of the posts or pages are supposed to be of higher ranking. If you haven’t checked out the Keyword suggestion tool by Neil Patel you are missing out!
The name of this tool is called Ubersuggest and it’s FREE to use. I love it because it is fast and very easy to use! As a matter of fact, I just went Pro last month with this fabulous tool.
Slugs Length for SEO Matters
Do you check the length of your slug? Do you know what that word means in WordPress?
It’s not slimy like the image you see here on the side.
It’s the tagline for your posts. Slugs are the text you can see in your URL when your post goes live.
These hold some important SEO juice for your post so please be sure to check out their length. It’s recommended that they be short and descriptive.
Yoast recommends no stop words in slugs as well. I do have one in this one – the word “The” is considered a stop word. There are times you cannot void them for them to make sense. You can check out a full list of stop words here.
Oftentimes I am in a rush and forget to change the slug. However, you can change it if you haven’t shared the post out online. Been there and done that!
The Best Keyword Density for Your Best SEO Friendly Guest Posts
Keyword density is another big SEO factor today. In the old days of SEO, it was using keywords as often as possible. It was called keyword stuffing. Yoast is now recommending 0.5 and 2.5% for your keyword density.
For Example: If your post is 2,500 words long you should have your keyword show up at least 13 times throughout your SEO-friendly blog post.
Today that is no longer the case, thank goodness! It is more about natural writing and content. But you need to have those keywords appearing a certain percentage of the time!
Transition Words Do Matter!
This one sometimes can be difficult for me, but I have Yoast SEO by my side! They will give you a red flag warning if you are not at this limit.
Next, you can then do a Google search for transition words and start the process.
Using the Premium Yoast SEO tool shows you exactly where you need to add these transition words.
Therefore, you must have at least 30% transition words within your writing. You need to take the reader from one thought to another smoothly.
Your readers don’t want to be on a roller coasting reading your posts.
Images for Your Best SEO Friendly Guest Posts
Are you using the alt image for all of your images? This is really important today as Google needs to read the images. Also, Twitter now has a feature where you can label your images so the blind can read them in their tweets. (It may also offer some extra SEO juice for your tweets).
Another new Google update has been the caption feature for product images. If you are selling products on a website or blog Google wants to see captions for these images. Furthermore, these images work on your Google Business Profile.
They will feature these images with captions more prominently in the search results. These are also important for mobile viewers.
If you don’t have product images, it is best to use your own images taken by your mobile device or camera like the one I’ve shared above.
In Conclusion of the Best SEO Friendly Guest Posts
Do you take SEO friendliness into consideration when you are submitting a guest post to your favorite blog? Are you writing to be sure your posts are also mobile-friendly?
I’d love to know more in the comments if you do or do NOT use SEO tactics in your guest posts.
