Bloggers are often doubting whether to focus on a blog post search engine optimization elements or just to have a blogging style that suits their blog readers by completely ignoring search engine traffic.

Can we have a win-win situation? Can a blog post be both reader-friendly and have the capabilities of pulling in search engine traffic for your blog? Yes, you can as everything is possible in blogging.

In today’s content creation tips, I will be giving you tips on how you can overcome this doubt and blog for both your readers and the search engine traffic stats of your blog.

Schedule for different blogging styles

You can’t have both search engine optimization and blog post readability at their best within a blog post. However, you can have both of them, implemented extensively in different blog posts. Try to have blogging weeks or days for full implementation of either search engine optimization or blog post readability and this will improve your blog as a whole, on capturing search engine traffic and satisfying your readers.

Cautious of sentence structure used

Try not to change part of a sentence just to optimize the blog post for search engines. If any extra seeding of keywords is required, the whole sentence or even the whole paragraph should be reviewed and rewritten if required. Shortcuts in proofreading should be evaded and blog post readability should be the priority when the targeted keywords are not suitable to be seeded into a particular section of the blog post.

Target only one keyword

Don’t target more than one keyword in a blog post. This will only make your writings deviate from proper readability. Also, targeting more than one keyword will only reduce the density of all the keywords you are targeting.

If you find it hard to decide on which keyword to target, use a keyword tracker to reveal which keyword is being searched more frequently. Also, a search on major search engines will reveal how many competitions that your blog post will be facing. Go for the articles that is capable of bringing in more traffic but with lesser competition.

Correct placement of targeted keywords

Many bloggers have the basic knowledge of keyword density for SEO purposes, which is to seed keywords all over a blog post. This is not actually the case as keywords will be given more weight if they are being placed at the start and the end of a blog post. Thus, no excessive keyword stuffing is needed within the blog post body.

Furthermore, keyword density is no longer important as it used to be in search engine optimization.

Fully utilize invisible blog post SEO elements

Invisible blog post search engine optimization elements include blog post URL, title and meta tags. URLs of each blog post can be customized and be seeded with keywords via the post slug field in your blog editor as shown in the screenshot below.

Using the All-In-One SEO Pack plugin will also give you the opportunity to customize your blog post title and the meta tags used in each and every one of your blog post. Compared to keyword density, these elements carry more weight in search engine optimization.

Use headers

Headers ("h" HTML tags) is a great blog post element to use if you want to have a win-win result when you have the doubts on which side fall to. Search engines, when they are indexing the contents of your blog, pay more weight to the keywords contained within your headers.

On the other hand, using prominent headers within your blog post also enhances readability as it allows scanning and fast reading. Also, planning out headers during a blog post creation process keeps the points from being jumbled up.

Internal linking

A proper internal linking structure also helps to push your blog post up the search engine index because search engines treat every single page on your blog as separate units and links to and fro contain value as well.

Use the Similar Post plugin and always link to relevant old blog posts so that search engine bots will have access to and reevaluate them when they crawl on your new contents.

Avoid allocation of time for blog post SEO

Some bloggers allocate about 15-30 minutes or more just to optimize their blog posts within their blog’s database for search engines. Revisiting old blog posts to update the information and correcting grammatical or spelling errors during blogging idle time will be good if there is no intentions to optimize them extensively for search engines.

Allocating time for blog post SEO tends to bring a blogger overboard in optimizing a blog post. Remember, even though you have a great ranking in the search engines and get good traffic, the visitors will not be attracted to stay long if they can’t read what you have to offer properly.

Consider other traffic sources

You have do acquire traffic from other sources if you are to neglect search engine traffic. The Internet has exploded with traffic generation method, especially after the boom of web 2.0.

Social media traffic such as those generated from StumbleUpon can be a great alternative for generating blog traffic and all you have to do is to write contents that compel social media users (people), which means you must have great readability in your blog post as well!

Search Engine Traffic or Blog Post Readability?

Targeting search engine traffic will give you a stable incoming traffic as long as people are making the search consistently via search engines. However, having good contents with proper readability keeps readers coming back to your blog and it eventually will build up a stable traffic base.

What is your say on this? Search engine traffic or blog post readability or implement my blogging tips above?

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