• Analyse your competitors (topics, frequency of posts, who writes them, how they are shared) to see what works and what doesn’t
• Make your content valuable and unique
• Subscribe to top industry blogs using RSS to keep track of the latest hot topics
• Search for people asking questions about your keyword or phrase on Twitter
• Ask your sales and support team what questions are asked most frequently by potential or current customers.

I’ll add a few other ideas that will help:

• Use bullet points and/or numbered lists to make it easier to read quickly
• Use multiple headings to break up the copy
• Write down blog ideas as they occur to you and keep them somewhere safe.

As I’ve said before, you need to write for your ideal client but it is worthwhile paying some attention to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). There are several tools that can help you with this and I use the WordPress SEO by Yoast PlugIn to help me with my blog structure.

After I’ve written my blog, I look at the General SEO settings. I make sure that I’ve selected a Focus Keyword, the main word or phrase that my post is about. For this blog, I used “main content”. You then have the option of changing the SEO Title, though you can leave it at the default. This has a limit of 70 characters. Finally, in this section, you can add a Meta Description. It will appear below your title in searches and so needs to give a flavour of the blog and its main content.

There is a handy traffic light system of Red, Amber, Yellow and Green and, even if all your options aren’t perfect they will be weighted to give you an average overall score. My score while I’m at this stage in writing my main content is showing as Green as you can see below:

By clicking on the Check link, you’ll see the Page Analysis.  

This gives you a score on a number of points and makes suggestions for improvements. It covers areas such as:

• Keyword density – how many times your keyword appears. For example, a keyword density of 3 times is seen as low but 6 times is good. However, this is relative to how many words you’ve written;
• Outbound links are considered good – I have 4 in this article so get a “green”;
• The score on the Flesch Reading Ease test tells you whether your copy is considered easy or difficult to read. I know I have a tendency to too long sentences and need to make them shorter;
• Your Page Title should be more than 40 characters and less than the recommended 70 character limit;
• You also get Green if you have more than 300 words, which is the recommended minimum
• Including an Alt Title on any visuals with your keyword is another green rating
• Using Headings to break up your copy is also consider good.

There are many other helpful areas that the plugin analyses.  The key is to have a go and see how it can help you structure your main content better. My warning still stands though – you need to write for your reader and not SEO!

I’d be interested to know what you use, if anything, to help with your SEO.