Blog SEO Best Practices 2026
The best on-page SEO tips to optimize your blog for organic search engine ranking and high click-thru rates.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is crucial for any marketer trying to make it big online. It doesn’t matter if you work for a big brand, run your own ecommerce store or if you are an affiliate marketer. If you’re going to make your brand stand out, and generate any kind of substantial income online, you must treat search engine optimization seriously.
The reason why you write, and optimize, your pages and blog posts in the first place is because you want visitors to find you through search engines like Bing and Google.
However, not everyone writes their content with search engine optimization in mind. Do you think about the SEO aspects of your blog when you are writing or finding topics to blog about? Does your blog content help your business organically rank on search engines or are they just digital landfill?
Does Blogging Help With SEO?
Blogging does help in boosting SEO quality by positioning your website as an authority in its field. What is important is that your posts provide relevant answers to your customers' questions. Without applying any off-site search engine optimization tactics such as backlinks and social signals, ranking is hard. But it is possible if you apply a few factors to your blog posts. Specifically, using a variety of on-page SEO tactics which gives you more opportunities to rank in search engines and get more purchase-ready customers to visit your website.
Quality, well-structured, content with good grammar and interesting graphics often rank higher than content of poorer quality. Content has always been king, but today even more so. Blog SEO is about applying best practices on your site, and two of the top factors are relevancy and search intent.
Ok, Google’s algorithm changes can drive the most experienced SEO specialists to tear their hair out. So, how can you as a business owner with plenty of other things to focus on find time to focus your attention on doing proper SEO for your blog and make sure you always follow the Google guidelines?
Luckily, it’s not that hard once you understand the basics. Ideally, you would leave the SEO part of your business to an SEO agency like ours but if you are just starting out you may not have the funds to spare right now. Or maybe you just like learning new things and having full control over your website.
Whatever the case, what’s important is that you know what ranking tactics work, avoid short-cuts and stay on the right path. When you focus on evergreen strategies like we do here at MWTS you don’t have to be too concerned with learning the latest trick.
Instead you can aim your focus on what actually works, and that doesn’t change too much over time: Quality content (on- page) and links (off-page).
Ok, I’ll explain…
1-2-3 Blog SEO
Through the following tips and ideas, our goal is to avoid the most common confusion we see from new marketers, entrepreneurs and bloggers trying to rank their content in the search engines. We’ll cover how to optimize your blog posts for maximum chance of success as well as some conversion tips and a few other factors you should focus on.
Alrighty, here are our wordpress blog optimization tips to enhance your content and improve your chances of ranking well in the search engines...
(These tips will also work if you’re not using WordPress, but our main focus will be on wordpress websites)
Obviously this list isn’t including any thinkable rule there is, but it is meant more like a guideline. Every SEO makes up their own strategies and standards and you could too, but these will at least give you a very good starting point.
Long-Tail Keywords To Match Search Intent
Gone are the days when keyword stuffing your blog posts with keywords was the right way to optimize your blog posts. Google is getting smarter and old keyword stuffing strategies will just hurt your website.
It makes perfect sense: Google wants you to provide interesting content that people actually want to read. They want you to provide answers to searchers questions. This has always been Google’s stance but since they weren’t as good at catching cheaters, webmasters and SEO’s gamed the system. Today, it’s all about giving the reader a good experience, i.e answering their search intent.
Therefore, you should not focus too much on keyword density (the percentage of keyword appearance in relation to other words on your page) and only use your keyword where it fits in naturally. If you are just stuffing in keywords it will feel intrusive to the reader and it doesn’t add any value to the content.
One way to rank quickly, and easily, without having to rely on backlinks is to optimize your content for long-tail keywords.
A good rule of thumb is to find two or three long-tail keywords. One of them should be your main keywords for which you optimize the content. The more searches this term gets, the better it is. However, how easy you can rank for a specific term is determined by the authority of your website and the power of your competitors.
The remaining two long-tail keywords could be search terms relevant to the main keyword, but that doesn’t receive enough searches to justify writing separate blog posts. Of course, if you can find three related keywords that all can receive a lot of traffic and have them all in one blog post that is even better.
Note:
The higher the authority of your website, the more keywords and longer posts you can rank. When you’re just starting out, however, optimizing for two-three long-tail keyword phrases per post is a good way to start.
Why long-tail keywords?
Long-tail phrases are often very specific or question-based keywords that keep your post focused on answering specific questions your audience may have.
Example
Shoes << Totally generic. Meaningless to optimize for.
Running shoes << Better, but difficult to understand search intent. Is the searcher looking for running shoes images, to learn what running shoes are or something completely different?
Best running shoes << Way better. This is a typical search term for affiliate websites. The searcher is looking for the best running shoes and is probably interested in buying.
Best running shoes for women << Now, we’re cooking. Imagine the searcher first makes a search for “best running shoes for women,” then she finds a couple of interesting shoes. Now she’s looking to learn more about a specific shoe and make the following search…
Nike Performance AIR ZOOM PEGASUS 37 Review << She’s card-in-hand ready to buy!
Visitors searching for long-tail keywords are way more likely to read the whole post and then move on to read more of your content as well. In addition, they are more likely to make a purchase. In other words, they are visitors who convert.
Let’s look at some further wordpress blog seo tips to help you with your blog seo search engine optimization…
Exactly Where To Add Your Keywords In Your Post
You have chosen two or three long-tail keywords to optimize your blog post for.
Now what?
Now it's time to add the keywords to your blog post. When doing blog seo you need to know where exactly to incorporate those keywords. More precisely, you need to know the best parts of your posts to include these terms in so you can rank as high as possible in the Google search results.
There are five specific places of your website, or more precisely the html body of your copy, where you should include the keywords.
They are:
- The URL
- Your title tag
- Your headers
- Your meta description
- The content
The URL
Your URL is an important part of your blog post. Here we are not talking about exact keyword matching domain names which used to be a ranking loophole a while ago, but more the url of your blog post.
The URL of your blog post adds relevance to your post and tells the search engines and website visitors what they can expect to read about on your website. It should be short and descriptive.
Example for the keyword “Best CRM Software”
Wrong:
allthingscrm.com/best-crm-software/check-out-our-best-crm-software-reviews-2020/
Why?
It’s keyword stuffed and spammy.
Right:
allthingscrm.com/crm-software/
allthingscrm.com/best-crm-software/
Why?
These are straight to the point and descriptive.
Since the search engines start by crawling your URL, and as they partly use it to understand what your post is about, you should do what you can to make it relevant and easy to read for both web crawlers and humans. There is a huge opportunity to optimize your URLs on every post you publish. Every post your site is on its own unique URL, so ensure you include keywords in the best places.
Note: The URL of your post is only a very small part of Google’s ranking factor, so don’t stress this too much. Unless your URL is looking keyword stuffed and spammy, you don’t need to change your URL structure.
Your Title Tag
The title tag of your blog post is what makes readers click on a search result. It is also how the readers and the web crawlers first get acquainted with your content.
The headline of your blog post will typically be the same as the title tag and it helps the search engines determine the relevancy of your content.
Therefore, including a keyword here is vital.
Here’s an example:
Always include your keyword within the first 60 characters of your title. If it’s longer Google will cut your title off.
If you’ve got a long headline and it won’t fit in to the 60 character limit, you basically have three options:
Let’s say you want to optimize for “Plumbing Companies in Charlottesville, VA.”
Your headline could read “The Best Way To Find The Cheapest Plumbing Companies in Charlottesville, VA with Images and Reviews”
- Use it as a title tag anyways and Google will cut it off.
It would look something like this when someone sees your result in the search engine:
The Best Way To Find The Cheapest Plumbing Companies in Char….
- You can rewrite the title tag to fit the 60 characters frame:
Looking for Top Rated Plumbing Companies in Charlottesville?
- Add the keyword first.
This one is often the best solution. You keep the same meaning of the headline, and let Google cut if off, but you keep the keywords by putting them first in the title tag:
Find Plumbing Companies in Charlottesville, VA? The Best Way…
By doing it this way, you still retain your posts relevancy and people searching for the term will be intrigued to learn more about the “best way to find the plumbing companies.”. The “...” trigger curiosity and is a great way to get clicks.
Here are some real life examples on how website owners choose to use title tags and meta descriptions to rank in Google and get clicks. Which one would you click on?
The Importance of Headers [Header Tags]
What are headers? Technically, they are the code on your website that looks like this:
