How to Structure a Blog Post for Best SEO Results

While what you write in a blog is way, way more important than how you structure it, it is also true that Google favors certain structural protocols that observe SEO best practices. 

The long and short of it is this: quality content will rank in time and generate views, whereas a thin, watery post that is structured according to SEO maxims will ultimately fall off the map. 

But a post that has good information and is structured properly? That is a thing of beauty. 

So if you got here looking for how to structure a blog post for best SEO results, here’s your primer. 

The Title 

While lots of ranking factors are important, if I had to assign a single most important one, I might say the blog title. 

This title is your one prime opportunity to let Google and search engines know exactly and succinctly what the purpose of the blog is. 

Shorter and to the point is better for SEO and probably for UX, too, so state your blog’s purpose as briefly and directly as you can.

If you have a target keyword in mind, include a perfect match of that in the title. If not, just be as concise as possible. 

Refer to the title of this post for inspiration. I took no poetic license. It won’t win me a Pulitzer Prize but “How to Structure a Blog Post for Best SEO Results” definitely sets a high bar for “what is this blog going to tell me about,” and there’s no arguing there. 

It just so happens that the title is a chance to get readers’ attention and vie for clicks, too, so keep that in mind. 

The Page Subsections 

Once you have a title squared away, try to break up your blog post according to digestible sections that are relevant to the subject matter, sort of like I’ve done here. 

You see, if you want to know how to structure a blog post for best SEO results, some things you’ll have to know how to do are how to optimize the title, page subsections, meta data, and a few other things. 

Now scroll through this post and see what my page subheaders are. See what I did there? You need to do the same thing. Break it out into steps if you can, and make each step its own subsection if you’re doing a how-to. 

One more thing: use header tags, and add them in manually if your page editor won’t do it for you. I mean <h2> and <h3> tags. Google scrapes pages looking for these as it indexes a page because it looks at the header tags for context relevant to the page. 

To Bullet or Not to Bullet 

Not every piece of content in the world lends itself to “bulletization,” and that’s just a fact. News articles, for instance, don’t generally yield good bullets. 

But a post like this? I could bullet the information in here. Let’s give it a go. Here’s the bulleted information for how to structure a blog post for best SEO results:

• Optimize your blog post title with exact match keywords

• Use H2 tags in your headers 

• Bullet information where possible

• Compress images and optimize with alt data

• Add keywords into your URL slug if possible when creating the page 

• Add a meta description for the blog after you write it 

• Add internal links from existing pages to the new post to boost authority 

• Answer as many user queries as possible, if they are relevant to the post subject matter 

 

Well, the proof is in the pudding there. This just happens to be a topic that can be summarized well through bullets, so it worked for me. It may for you, depending on what you’re writing about. 

Another thing: to a computer, bullets are code, and Google’s algorithm “understands” that bullets are used to concisely convey information. There’s a good chance that bulleted information increases the likelihood that your post will get a featured snippet, show up in the Google AI Overview, or in other search features. 

Image Optimization

Image optimization is another important area of blog structure that will impact performance, though it will mainly impact the post’s rankings in the “Image” section of the search results. 

This is something I covered fully in a recent post, “How to Get Images to Rank (Image Optimization Guide)”. Ultimately, it comes down to compressing images to increase page load speeds, and then adding alt text – plus a few other small things. 

Check that previous post for an easy to follow, step-by-step guide on getting images to rank, as this will impact SEO results. 

URL Optimization 

In my personal experience, this is probably the ranking factor with the most insignificant amount of pull when it comes to how to structure a blog post for best SEO results. Nonetheless, it is technically a ranking factor, so it behooves me to say a word or two on it.

For my own purposes, I generally just title blogs so that the URL slug is whatever the blog post title is. If your post title is optimized, your URL slug will then automatically be optimized, too, especially if you’re using WordPress. 

If your editor lets you make granular adjustments to the page URL slug, make sure you customize them before the page goes live, because if you change the URL slug ex post facto, then anywhere there’s a link on the web to that post, you just created a 404 on your website – and that is not good for SEO.

Meta Descriptions 

Meta descriptions, like URL slugs, are not a huge deal, and Google will automatically generate them from the text on the page if you haven’t specifically written and assigned one.

With that said, meta descriptions are a small ranking signal and they can affect click-through rates, so it’s in your best interest to write your own, include any keywords for which you want the page to rank, and say something to entice any viewers to click and read. 

A Note on Internal Linking

You may have heard it said 1000 times that links are important for SEO. Well, it’s true, and if you’re looking for how to structure a blog post for SEO results I have a hack that can help get your new post to show up in the search engine results pages faster than it would have otherwise. 

If you’re posting on a domain where you have editor access, and other posts you’ve already published, include a link from one of your posts that’s already ranking, so that it sends traffic to this new page. 

A link from an old performer to a new post tells search engines like Google that a “respectable” piece of content views a “new” piece of content as an authority, and may get it to show up higher in the SERPs than it would without the link. No need to thank me!

The Use of Bolding

Way back when (like 6 years ago, an eternity in digital marketing) when Google’s algorithm was a much simpler thing, SEO experts used to bold keywords and important search terms in their copy. 

Google would see that bold tag, go straight to that phrase, and then see that the keyword was embedded in it. That was like a double whammy (in a good way) and Google would be like “Wow, this page is really an authority on this keyword, better put it right at the top of the SERPs.”

Over time, this practice has fallen off as SEO “experts” have increasingly relied on this tactic to get copy to rank, which has resulted in a net increase of nonsense on the internet. And now, today, bolding doesn’t really matter as much as it used to. 

But it doesn’t hurt, either. What I did there was bold a piece of important information that, even though it doesn’t contain any important target keywords, is relevant to the query posed by this section. 

You may also notice that I bolded my bullets, above. It adds a little bit of emphasis, which doesn’t hurt and might help. It certainly affects the user experience, and arrests attention, and since time on page is officially a ranking signal, getting users to stop and stare doesn’t hurt me, it does help. 

So the takeaway here is that bolding keywords can’t be relied on as a strategy in its own right to get a piece of content to rank, but using bolding sparingly to emphasize important nuggets of information can be beneficial to blog structure. Notice that part is also bolded. So take that for what it’s worth. 

Large Paragraphs or Single Sentences?

A debate has been raging in SEO central since time immemorial: is it better to write walls of text or publish really short, one-sentence “paragraphs.” 

Honestly, it really depends. 

If you’re writing a study and publishing it to a scientific journal, you definitely want to follow accepted guidelines that generally dictate that one paragraph should propose and answer a single, small thesis. You can’t do that in one sentence. 

At the same time, we are writing for people to read what we publish. Most readers have short attention spans and skim, rather than read, entirely articles. 

It is this latter part that makes “short and sweet” paragraph structure appealing to search engines. 

Really, consider your audience. If you’re writing a recipe or a fashion listicle, keep it short. If you’re submitting to an accredited news organization or a medical journal, follow MLA or APA guidelines for paragraph structure, or whichever else applies to your publisher. 

Long or Short?

Another serious debate in the world of SEO has been whether or not long, exhaustive articles, or short nuggets of information were better. 

The answer is yes. 

I mean to say, they’re both excellent. What matters here is search intent. 

If a user looks up a post on “how to tie shoelaces” a 500-word post with pictures and captions is likely going to outperform a 10,000 word behemoth of an article that not only covers how to tie laces but also every different pattern and profile of boot and shoe. 

On the flipside, if you look up a “guide to the different styles of dress shoes” you’re probably going to get a lot of long posts in the search results. 

Again, it’s all about what people are looking for. There are some short posts that rank very well, and also many long ones. The only right answer here is this: think about the information relevant to your target audience, cover it thoroughly, and be done. 

If that requires 400 words, that’s all you need, seriously. But if you end up with a 7,000 word banger, that’s also good, as long as there’s no fluff. 

Blogs (or Other Content Creation) as an Immutable Component of Effective SEO

At the end of the day, if I had to give suggestions this granular for technical SEO, I’d pull my hair out. That’s only partly because I’m a copywriter. The main reason is that content is the definitive pillar of SEO. 

I can say confidently, and without exaggeration, that I’ve seen websites with a domain authority of zero hit page one with optimized content alone – without any technical SEO, without any backlink strategy, and without any keyword research. 

That is how important content is, and why it’s so important to understand what you need to do in order to get a blog (or other page) to rank organically. If you can, everything else related to search engine optimization will fall into place.