Post Series SEO How To Optimize Your Articles For Search Engines

Running a blog post series is one of the best things you can do to increase your blog’s stickiness and get more subscribers.

But, like most things associated with blogging, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it.

Here’s how to SEO your series so you and your readers get the full benefit from all your hard work.

Keywords And Titles

Get the full benefit by using your main keyword for the first post in the series and then using long-tails for each individual post. Avoid using the same keyword twice and creating over-lapping content. If you use the same keyword in every title you’ll simply end up fighting yourself for index position. Get your series listed on as many different indexes as possible.

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Optimize Content

Always start each post in the series with a brief explanation. Let the visitor know he’s come in in the middle of an ongoing series of posts and tell him what the series is about. Use this opening paragraph to grab the readers attention and alert him to the fact that you have so much useful information you had to break it up into several posts.

Optimize Navigation

Keep in mind, some of your readers may come in on one of the posts in the middle of the series. Optimize navigation to make it easy for visitors to find every post, from beginning to end.

Instead of using a related posts plug-in that may or may not pull up every post in the series, hand-code the links into your content. Use text links inside the post and link to complete titles at the end of each post. Always let visitors know what they’ll find on each post of the series.

Don’t forget to link to relevant content in your archives, too. This is the perfect opportunity to send visitors to posts that define industry jargon, list posts, and evergreen content.

Highlight you series posts in your sidebar, too, to attract more attention.

This internal linking also makes it easier for the bots to scan your entire series which helps improve your SEO and page rank.

Link Worthy Content

Create one compilation post, either at the beginning of your series or the end, and pack this post full of information, including links to each post in the series. The goal is to create a post that will attract incoming links and help that lead-in page rank higher in the search index.

Use Clear Breaks In Topic

Each post in your series should be about a specific sub-topic that’s clearly defined. Google’s bots recognize most synonyms now. When each post has its own specific sub-topic it ranks for that keyword phrase, and the bots will also associate it with its main topic. This helps your series appear on more pages in the index, which makes it easier for readers to find it.

Clear breaks in topic also make it easier for your visitors to read and absorb the information before they move on to the next post in the series.