Best SEO Blogging Platforms

There are many SEO blogging platforms out there, but which is the best SEO blogging platform that you should start blogging with?

Many bloggers struggle with ranking their blogs in the Google search results. They update their blogs with fresh content every day, but this still doesn't get them to the first (or even the second) page of Google's search results. What is it they're doing wrong? Well, simply, they're overlooking the significance of SEO in blogging.

Numerous blogging platforms support search engine optimization, but choosing the best SEO blogging platform is critical to ensure that you set yourself on the right track. Three of the most popular platforms for SEO blogging include WordPress, Squarespace, and Ghost.

Blogging isn't just about creating great content. No matter how good your content is, if it doesn't reach the right audience, it's of no real use. This is one of the biggest challenges in blogging. Another factor that many fresh bloggers tend to overlook is the competition. Numerous bloggers will work in the same niche as you, and diverting traffic to your blog won't come easy. This is where SEO comes into play.

As SEO experts, we can assure you of one thing: if you focus on SEO, not only will you be able to reach the right audience, but you will also manage to supersede your competitors in Google search results.

‍Significance of SEO in Blogging

If you think creating new and valuable content for your blog regularly is enough to keep the blog going, you're highly mistaken. Creating content is one thing and ensuring the content reaches the right audience is another, and as long as these two factors don't go hand in hand, your blog won't become a success.

Blog SEO is more about optimizing the blog's content, the website's architecture, and the HTML code for search engines. On-page optimization, improving the page's loading speed, installation of plug-ins, and internal linking are some of the tasks associated with blog SEO.

SEO isn't simple and straightforward. It requires adequate knowledge of various factors and elements. Once you grasp the proper understanding of SEO, you'll be able to do SEO blogging right. SEO improves the visibility of your blog and increases the traffic to your blog. SEO can also enhance the visitor experience and help you establish a lasting audience.

Let's have a look at some of the benefits of SEO blogging in detail below:

Improved Visibility

Let's say you run a digital marketing-oriented blog where you share valuable content with readers that could help them take their business to new levels of success. However, when someone searches for digital marketing on Google, your blog appears on the second or third page of Google search engine results.

Only 25% of people searching for something on Google go beyond the first page of the search results. Only 25% of these searches go to the second page. If your page doesn't appear on the first page, you're losing a lot of potential readers. However, blog SEO would help you bring your blog higher up on the search results so that a greater number of people can see your blog on the first page.

Increased Traffic

When more people can see your blog higher up in the search results, your blog will receive more traffic. According to stats, the first search result gets 32% of the total clicks. In fact, if you manage to bring your blog even a single level up the search results (let's say, from 5th rank to 4th), the traffic is likely to increase by 30%. SEO is the secret tool you need if you want more people to find your blog.

Enhanced User Experience

SEO blogging isn't limited to content only. As we've said above, it also encompasses the website architecture. SEO includes optimizing the design of your website such that the users don't find it difficult to navigate through it. Optimizing the website design for desktop and mobile use is critical as most people browse the web through their phones.

If your blog's website isn't mobile-friendly, the bounce rate from your blog will be pretty high. And just so you know, Google doesn't consider a high bounce rate a good thing. The higher the bounce rate of your blog is, the poorer you'll be ranked by Google. Optimizing the website architecture can really turn out well in favor of your blog.

How to Optimize Your Blog for SEO

You might not be able to do the SEO of your blog right the first time as it requires time and experience to understand SEO and figure a way through it. However, we've put together a quick guide on how to optimize the SEO of your blog, which will definitely help you take your first steps.

Identify the Audience You Want to Target

If you think everyone is your target audience, you're starting off wrong. Not everyone likes all types of content. If you want to make your blog a success, make sure you're clear about who you're targeting with your content.

For example, if you're a digital marketer, your target audience should be startups and small-scale businesses that could benefit from digital marketing. Therefore, the first step of SEO blogging is to identify your target audience and then produce content that would grab their attention.

Conduct Thorough Keyword Research

For most people, keywords are just words, but in the world of SEO, keywords are so much more than just words. Keywords are what will affect the ranking of your blog on Google SERP (search engine results page).

If you use the right keywords, the chances that your blog will appear on the first page on Google searches are quite high. Various keyword tools can help you figure out which keywords will get you the maximum traffic.

Add Visuals and Alt Image Text

Adding visuals to your blog's content is a great way to optimize it. Not only does it grab visitors' attention, but blogs with visual elements are ranked higher on SERP. Another sure-shot way of appearing higher up in the SERP is to use Alt Image Text.

Alt Image Text plays a major role in determining whether or not your blog appears on the first page on Google searches and gets a good ranking.

Work on Your Blog's Title

Your blog's title should not be just attractive, but it should contain the right keywords and power words. The right choice of words for the title will ensure that your blog gets ranked higher up in Google's search results.

And, of course, the higher up in the search results you appear, the higher the visibility and the greater the traffic will be.

Choosing the Right Blogging Platform

Not all blogging platforms are equal. Some platforms are only equipped with features that are suitable for basic-level personal blogs, while others are more suited for more professional blogs.

Some blogging platforms don't facilitate SEO, while others come with specialized SEO tools that make SEO blogging easier and far more effective. Choosing the right blogging platform is one of the most important factors to ensure that your blog turns out just how you want.

Let's have a look at some of the most important factors that you must consider when choosing a blogging platform to start your blog:

Ease of Use

The first and foremost factor that you should consider when choosing a blogging platform is how easy it is to use. The platform should be easy to understand and use. The user interface shouldn't be too complicated.

It's particularly more important for beginners who don't have much experience with blogging and related tools. If a blogging platform is too complex or complicated, you'll find it difficult to navigate and use the platform to the best of its potential.

Some blogging platforms require the user to work on coding. Such platforms aren't suitable for beginners because not everyone can understand coding.

It takes seasoned bloggers to do the coding for their blogs, and if you're just taking your first steps, you should choose a blogging platform that does the coding for you automatically.

Flexibility

Some blogging platforms provide more room for changes than others. If you're planning to take your blog to new heights and places in the future, you should consider a blogging platform that allows you to make changes and modifications in the future.

Let's say you don't intend to monetize your blog yet, but you may want to take that route in the future. In this case, a blogging platform that offers flexibility will make things easier for you. Switching blogging platforms once the blog is up and running can be too much hassle!

SEO-Friendliness

Not all blogging platforms make SEO-friendly blogs. SEO-friendliness should be a prerequisite when choosing a blogging platform. You should consider a blogging platform if it has a reputation and track record of producing SEO-friendly blogs. Only SEO-friendly blogs will show higher up in the SERP.

Non-SEO-friendly blogs don't receive as much traffic as SEO-friendly blogs. Since you already know the significance of SEO blogging by now, you should only choose a platform that is equipped with the right tools and plug-ins that you'll need to optimize your blog.

Best SEO Blogging Platforms

There are plenty of blogging platforms available today, but like we said earlier, not all blogging platforms are equal. Considering the importance of SEO for blogs, we've compiled a list of some of the best SEO-friendly blogging platforms to help you start off right!‍

‍WordPress

WordPress is the best SEO blogging platform. It's the undisputed giant in the blogging industry, and this is something that everyone just agrees with. It's one of the few blogging platforms that has its own self-hosted CMS (Content Management Software), and it's unarguably the best CMS on the market today.

WordPress has powered millions of blogs and websites. Some of the biggest and most established websites you know of today are built on WordPress, including the New York Times, BBC America, Sony Music, MTV News, and numerous others.

Whether you're building a personal blog or a professional business website, WordPress is highly suited to all objectives. The best thing about WordPress is that it's absolutely free!

WordPress isn't leading the industry for nothing. With more than 7,000 free themes and 55,000 free plug-ins, WordPress offers the greatest number of options to its users to design and customize their blogs however they want. If you choose to sign up for the paid premium version, you'll get access to an even greater collection of themes and plug-ins.

Not only does WordPress enable bloggers to make a blog just like they envisioned, but it also ensures that their website is fully functional. And, of course, it's extremely SEO-friendly, which means making your blog on WordPress would help you get your blog to rank better in search results.

SEO-Friendliness of WordPress

We aren't kidding when we say that WordPress is the most SEO-friendly blogging platform out there. You'll be enthralled to see the number of features it has that can facilitate SEO blogging.

Customizable Permalinks

One of the most important factors to remember when setting up your blog is to ensure that the URL of your blog is easy to remember. Users may not be able to remember a URL like https://www.blogname.com/(long complicated code)/, but if the URL is simple and clean, like https://www.blogname.com/blog, the chances that users will remember it are high.

Not only are simple permalinks easier to remember, but they also help rank your blog higher in the SERPs. If you manage to incorporate the right keywords to the permalink and try to keep it as simple as possible, there's a high probability of your page ranking better.

Not all blogging platforms allow their users to customize their permalinks, but WordPress does! You can format the URL of your blog to make it as crisp and clean as you wish. And it's not just the main URL of the blog that can be customized; WordPress also allows you to customize individual permalinks to make them SEO-friendly.

SEO-Friendly Titles

The title of your blog is the first thing that a reader will come across. The title should be such that it instantly grabs the attention. The title will give the readers an insight into what to expect from the content and help the search engine categorize your blog correctly.

The chances of your blog ranking higher on SERP are greater if it contains the right keywords in it. You read that right. You've got to work on optimizing your blogs' titles to make sure they get ranked on search engines. And we kid you not – creating SEO-friendly titles is no joke! But with WordPress, you don't have to worry about your blog titles.

WordPress is equipped with plenty of plug-ins that help you create attractive and SEO-friendly titles for your blogs, thereby reducing the time and effort you would otherwise have to put in to come up with the title that's just right!

SEO-Friendly Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are what you see just under the blog title on the SERP. It's a brief description of what the blog is about. It's more like a brief insight into the title.

The meta description helps the readers decide if they want to read your blog; it also helps the search engine bots better understand the content of your blog. This ensures that your blog appears in search results when someone searches for something that your blog can help them with.

WordPress optimizes the meta descriptions for you by default. It doesn't just optimize the meat descriptions for Google but for other search engines as well. What's more, is that WordPress also allows you to install external plug-ins for optimizing your content, like the plug-in for Yoast SEO.

Search Engine-Friendly Code

A website that is built on clean code as its foundation, which is optimized for desktop and mobile, is the most SEO-friendly website. WordPress optimizes your blog from the front end and the backend. WordPress codes your website to ensure the search engines can crawl into it easily and display it in the search results.

It's majorly written with PHP, but the CMS of WordPress is still equipped with HTML so that it can optimize your content to make it easily searchable. WordPress also codes websites in HTML5 that develops a much cleaner and cross-platform-friendly website code.

The best part about building your blog on WordPress is that it optimizes your blog to perform well on mobile. In short, WordPress has got you covered from all sides.

SEO-Friendly Themes

You may not know this, but the blog's theme can also affect the ranking on SERP. It's pretty simple to understand.

One of the major factors of SEO blogging is to optimize the design and architecture of your blog to offer a good and smooth user experience. The theme of your website plays a primary role in the overall design, aesthetics, and functionality.

WordPress has a collection of more than 7,000 themes. With so many options, finding a theme that sits well with your objective won't be a problem. You're sure to find a theme that reflects your blog in the truest of the essence.

The better your choice of theme is, the greater are the chances of visitors coming back to your blog. And the higher the number of people returning to your blog, the higher is the probability of search engines identifying your blog as valuable and relevant.

As a result, your blog will get ranked higher up in the search results. But this is just one way in which the themes can affect your search results rank.

Themes have an influence on the HTML markup of a website. For example, when a theme uses the H1 format for your blog's title, the search engines will identify the H1 title of your content because the search engines can only identify H1 tags.

This way, WordPress themes do a lot of work for you without you having to put any extra effort into the formatting of your blog.

Image Optimization

Ask yourself a question: would you be more inclined to a website with attractive and interactive visuals or a website with loads of black and white content? Of course, it has to be the former.

Adding images to your blog is a great way to make your blog attractive, but did you know that if you don't optimize the images, they can end up slowing the loading speed of your blog. A slower loading speed means a higher bounce-off rate, which will negatively affect your blog's ranking.

Thanks to WordPress, you can optimize the images on your blog without any hassle. You can resize the image size using the WordPress editor. A smaller image size improves the loading speed of the blog. You can even add image descriptions and alt tags that can take the image optimization to the next level!

These are just a few of the many ways in which WordPress facilitates the SEO of your blog. Unarguably, the SEO features of WordPress are the best and most extensive, making it the best SEO blogging platform without an ounce of doubt.

Squarespace

WordPress isn't your only option when it comes to SEO blogging. Squarespace is a fine option too. The SEO capabilities of Squarespace are still undiscovered, but we're here to unveil its search optimization potential. If you want to know if building your blog with Squarespace will help you rank well, the answer is yes.

Squarespace is equipped with numerous and pretty promising SEO tools. This blogging platform enables you to leverage its advanced SEO tools to optimize your blog for both visitors and search engines.

We've listed down some of the most prominent ways in which Squarespace helps you optimize your content for excellent rankings on search results and ensure that you get a good base of returning audience.

Clean URLs

Squarespace generates clean static URLs for your blog. Unlike other blogging platforms, the URLs that Squarespace generates are simple and easy to remember.

While it doesn't allow the users to customize URLs, not many users feel the need to do that anyway since the automatically generated ones are pretty clean and simple too.

SSL Certificate

An SSL Certificate provides security to the website for online communications. Not only does an SSL Certificate authenticate the ownership of the website, but it also ensures data security and prevents any attacks on a website.

Above all, a website that is SSL certified is more trusted by the users. Moreover, an SSL certificate can also help improve your blog's SEO ranking. The biggest benefit of using Squarespace for your blog is getting an SSL certificate for free.

You don't have to purchase an SSL Certificate for your blog separately when using this blogging platform.

Optimization of Titles and Meta Description

You already know how important the optimization of your blog title and meta description is for a better ranking on search results. The title of your blog is what the reader will see first, and if it's catchy, the reader will stop. Moreover, if it has all the right keywords, the chances of your blog appearing higher up in search results are also high.

Let's say your title did catch the reader's attention; what comes next? The Meta description. The Meta description gives the reader a fair idea of what the content is about. It's at this very point the reader will decide if they want to read the full content.

The Meta description, just like the title, should be catchy and must be optimized with the right keywords. And with Squarespace, you can never go wrong with these 2 factors. You can edit the title and Meta description of your blog with Squarespace.

Sitemap

A sitemap plays a crucial role in determining whether your blog gets ranked or not. A sitemap is more like an outline of your website with all the pages. Creating a sitemap for your website can change the SEO game for you. Search engines don't really know what's on your blog.

They won't be able to show your blog in search results without this information. However, a sitemap helps search engines understand your website better and enables it to display your website when someone runs a relevant search.

A sitemap makes it easier for search engines to crawl a website, thereby improving the chances of your website appearing in search results, and that too, at a good rank.

Squarespace generates a sitemap for your website automatically. Although you've got to submit it to Google yourself, Squarespace takes care of the major work for you.

Mobile-Friendly Websites

The majority of surfers surf the web through their phones. It means that if you want your blog's content to be accessible to the maximum number of people, you've got to optimize it for mobile use. But if you're using Squarespace as your blogging platform, you're sorted in this area.

With Squarespace's Accelerated Mobile Pages feature, your blog is automatically optimized to load quickly on mobiles. The sooner your website loads, the better it's ranked by Google.

The SEO tools offered by Squarespace ensure that your blog is SEO-friendly and that it gets ranked higher up in the search results. Although Squarespace isn't free, it's pretty affordable and every bit worth it, making it a great choice for SEO blogging.

Ghost

Ghost is often referred to as an alternative to WordPress. The question is whether it's as SEO-friendly as WordPress because that's what we're counting here.

The answer to that question is yes. Ghost is a very SEO-friendly blogging platform.

Ghost is different from most blogging websites. Unlike others, this blogging platform focuses more on content publishing than website building. Some of the most popular websites that you often visit are made on Ghost, including Tinder, Duolingo, Mozilla, and Unsplash.

The biggest catch with Ghost is the excellent number of choices when it comes to themes. It comes with plenty of pre-made, ready-to-use themes, but you can always custom-build your own themes so that the theme is a true depiction of your blog.

Coming to the more important part of the discussion, what features does Ghost offer that makes it a great SEO blogging platform?

XML Sitemap

One of the features of Ghost that makes it such a promising SEO blogging platform is the automatic generation of XML sitemap generation. Search engines better understand websites that have a sitemap.

Search engines are able to crawl a website more easily when there's a sitemap. The better the search engine understands your blog's content, the more often your blog will appear in search results.

URL Optimization

We've said this before, and we'll say this again: you should try to make the URL of your blog simple and clean so that it's easier to remember. URL optimization is a critical factor in SEO blogging, and it can really impact your SERP ranking.

When you're using Ghost for SEO blogging, you can simply stop worrying about this because this blogging platform optimizes your blog URL for you and ensures that it contains the right keywords and is clean, thereby optimizing it for both the search engines and the users.

Meta Titles and Meta Description

Ghost enables you to edit and optimize your blog's Meta title and Meta description. You can optimize the Meta details with the right keywords so that your blog appears higher up in the search results.

Node.js Technology

Would you believe it if we told you that Ghost is much faster than WordPress? Well, it is! This is because Ghost runs on Node.js technology, making it one of the fastest SEO blogging platforms.