I always tell people that when they blog, seize every opportunity to try to rank for every single one of their posts. And we already know why Page 1 Ranking is important.

Keywords ranked on page 1 of search engines are going to get clicked and contribute to the bulk of your website organic traffic.

There are suggested methods and steps to optimize SEO and you can search for my articles under the SEO category to read about them. My experience is that they largely work though it is still quite difficult to determine for sure how long it will take particular keywords to rank well.

Even keyword research tools are not 100% accurate in telling you the keyword competition levels, and therefore a keyword deemed easy to rank takes a longer time to actually be on page 1.

Today, I share my secrets in trying to rank for every single one of my posts.

My Blog Writing Routine

Secret # 1 

Of course, your blog article title should capture attention such that people are interested to find out more. And that means your meta description should also be carefully crafted; same goes with the first one or two paragraphs of your article.

To me, I also do another step even before writing the post, and that’s keyword research for every single post. The post title usually has the h1 tag and this is the “signal” you are giving Google when it crawls your website, telling Google what the post is about.

So the title is my keyword. And I go for low competition keywords. The idea is that even if I don’t deliberately optimize SEO for the particular posts/keywords, they are still going to rank and hopefully at least on page 1 but not necessary top 5 positions say.

The search volume still has to be meaningful.

Secret # 2

I maintain a journal of posts I have written and the associated keywords. I then track the rankings I am achieving. I also then compare this journal against Google Webmaster search analytics data.

I know this is tedious and I would suggest you can do this partially, not for every single post. I understand when inspiration comes, you just want to pen down certain posts. Don’t disturb those occasions.

Over time, this allows me visibility which keywords I should spend more efforts optimizing and also how I can shorten long-tailed keywords to shorter-tailed keywords so that for a post, I can rank well for multiple related keywords.

Let me give you an example. My post Why Is Page 1 Ranking Important is currently ranked on page 1 position 3. This post also ranks on page 1 position 10 for Page 1 Ranking. I would want to optimize for the shorter keyword as it has more search volume.

Secret # 3

I actually have shared this secret before. This ninja trick works well for me.

After I finish writing each post, I will share on social media and related forums as widely as possible. I will also sometimes get to Google Webmaster to perform Fetch My Google so that my post gets indexed faster.

If I am lazy on any particular day, there is one place that I will at least share though. And that’s Google+ platform. No prizes if you guess correctly the reason.

So that’s it, each post takes some effort to write, some posts more than others. Do not waste any of it. The quality of the contents surely goes a long way benefiting your readers but do leverage on each article to improve your SEO ranking concurrently.

At Anspire Consulting, as part of our Digital Marketing Services portfolio, we do help our clients with SEO strategies including contents marketing. We welcome you to connect.