There are two SEO questions we get at Peaceful Media more often than any other:
A) What SEO keywords should I use on my website or blog?
B) How do I optimize my pages and posts for SEO?
I’ll outline an onpage keyword strategy for a blog, but the same principles apply to a page on your website. And what better blog to optimize than the one you’re reading? Let me show you exactly how I would optimize it.
Step 1: Select Your SEO Keyphrase
If you haven’t already, start with our companion piece on how to do keyword research, which covers finding a phrase you can realistically rank for. For now, let’s say I’ve done my research and chosen the keyphrase “How To Optimize Blog Posts For SEO.”
Sample keyword list:
Step 2: Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
What is your Title Tag? It’s one of the first things Google notices about a webpage or blog: the large, dark blue text you see when you do a Google Search. Keep it to about 60 characters.
Why 60 and not a rounder number? Because Google doesn’t count characters. It truncates on pixel width, somewhere around 580px, so a title full of narrow letters survives longer than one full of wide ones. “Illiterate Minimalist Films” and “MMMWWW Wholesale Grommets” are the same character count and nowhere near the same width. Sixty is the safe rule of thumb; if your title is heavy on capitals and wide letters, budget less.
What about Meta Descriptions? Those are the longer descriptions right below the Title Tag. Keep them to 160 characters or fewer. You may run across older articles citing a 2017 change where Google started showing much longer snippets. Ignore them. Google reverted that in 2018, and 160 has been the working ceiling ever since.
Here’s the more important thing to know about meta descriptions in 2026: Google rewrites them most of the time. Study after study has found that Google discards the author’s description and generates its own from page content for the majority of queries, because it’s tailoring the snippet to the specific search. This doesn’t make the tag worthless. It’s your opening bid, it’s what gets used when it does match the query, and other platforms use it verbatim when your link is shared. But don’t agonize over it for an hour, and don’t treat a rewritten snippet as a sign you did something wrong.
Setting these depends on your platform. On WordPress, Yoast SEO or Rank Math both make it a fill-in-the-blank field at the bottom of the post editor. Squarespace, Webflow, and Shopify have the fields built into per-page settings. If you’re on a modern static framework (this site runs on Astro), you’re setting them directly in your page’s frontmatter or head component. The plugin is a convenience, not the mechanism: underneath, it’s always just two tags in your HTML <head>.
You’ll notice ^^^ that I used the EXACT keyword in the Title Tag and a close approximate in the Meta Description. Google has said in the past that it doesn’t count the meta description when ranking your site (whether that’s true is anyone’s guess), but my convention is to always use my exact keyphrase in the Title Tag and something pretty darn close in the Meta Description. Here, I phrased the keyphrase as a question to make it sound more human.
Good SEO shouldn’t sound like a robot has written your blog or your SEO tags.
Step 3: Body Copy
It’s worth repeating: don’t get so overzealous about getting SEO keywords into your blog or webpage that you corrupt your own voice as a writer. With the sheer volume of content online these days, your unique voice (charming, funny, blunt, inviting, inventive, etc) is your best chance to cut through what Jeff Walker calls the “digital fog” (an oversaturation of online content). There is a way to do both! It just takes a little TLC.
That’s easy for me to say, since I’m writing a blog about SEO keywords and got to literally tell you what keyphrase I went after. Pretty on the nose, I know.
Your exact keyphrase should appear at least twice on the blog or webpage, with the first as close to the top of the page as possible. Did you notice me sneak the title of my article into my first full paragraph?
Step 4: What About My Images, John?
I’m so glad you asked. This part is easy. When you post images online, name the image file something close to your chosen SEO keyword (optimize-blog-posts-for-seo.jpg, not IMG_4471.jpg) and include that keyword in the ALT TEXT. WordPress gives you both fields in the media sidebar; every other platform has an equivalent, and if you’re hand-writing HTML it’s just the alt attribute.
One caveat on alt text, and it matters: alt text exists for people using screen readers. Its job is to describe the image to someone who can’t see it. Keyword placement is a happy side effect of writing a good description, not a license to stuff a phrase into a field where it doesn’t belong. If your alt text would be nonsense read aloud, you’ve optimized the wrong thing.
While you’re in there, compress the image and give it explicit width and height attributes. Oversized images are the single most common cause of a slow page, and slow pages lose rankings. We go deep on this in how to optimize your website for speed.
Step 5: Links, Internal & External
When you think about why Google ranks the pages it ranks, always think about LINKS. Every time someone links to your site, Google treats that as one person “voting” for you and as a sign that your website or blog is about what you say it’s about.
So what kinds of links are there, and where do they come from?
🔗 Internal Links
These are links that come from within your own site.
🔗 External Links
These are links that come from someone else’s website. External links are SEO gold, but much harder to come by. Best practices for earning new external links (“link building” in the SEO world) could fill a whole article, but here’s the thing to internalize: it is quality and relevance, not volume.
I want to be blunt about this because I used to say it the other way. It is not true that the more links you have, the more seriously Google takes you. That was roughly true in 2011. Then Google shipped the Penguin update specifically to punish it, and sites that had bought their way to a big link count got wiped out. One link from a respected publication in your industry is worth more than a thousand from directories, comment sections, and link-exchange schemes, and the thousand can actively hurt you. Chase relevance. A link is a recommendation from a real site whose audience overlaps yours; if it isn’t that, it isn’t worth having.
To learn more about link building, MOZ has a great article on it and is a trusted resource for us at Peaceful Media as we keep up with ever-changing SEO best practices. Did you notice what I just did there? I just gave MOZ one new external link.
Step 6: Optimize for Answer Engines, Not Just Search Engines
Everything above still works. But when I first wrote this post, there was exactly one way a person found your blog: they typed something into Google and clicked a blue link. That is no longer the only path, and for a growing share of questions it isn’t even the main one.
Now your post also has to be readable by answer engines: Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and whatever launches next quarter. These don’t send a ranked list of links. They read the web, synthesize an answer, and cite a handful of sources. Your goal shifts from rank first to be the thing that gets quoted. We call this AEO (answer engine optimization), and it’s become a big enough piece of the work that we offer it as a service.
The good news: it isn’t a separate discipline bolted onto SEO. It’s mostly the same craft, aimed slightly differently:
Write question-shaped headings. Instead of an H2 that says “Meta Descriptions,” write “How long should a meta description be?” People phrase things to AI assistants as full questions, and a heading that matches the question is the strongest possible signal that the answer lives underneath it.
Put an extractable answer in the first paragraph under each heading. Two or three sentences that fully answer the question on their own, before you add the nuance and the caveats and the story. If a machine lifted that paragraph out and showed it with your name on it, would it be correct and complete? That’s the test. Burying the answer in paragraph six is how you get read but not cited.
Add structured data. Marking up your post with schema.org Article and FAQPage tells machines what your content is rather than making them guess from the prose. This post carries FAQ markup, and the questions in it are the ones a reader would ask. Most CMS SEO plugins generate the basics; on a custom build you’re emitting JSON-LD yourself.
Be specific, and be sourced. Answer engines are built to avoid confidently repeating nonsense, so they lean toward content with concrete numbers, named sources, and clear expertise behind it. Vague, hedge-everything copy doesn’t get cited. This is also why the byline and the about page matter more than they used to: demonstrable expertise is a ranking input now, not a nicety.
Keep it clean and fast. An answer engine crawling your page has the same problem a human does: if the content is buried in scripts, gated, or slow, it may not get read.
Here’s the honest strategic note. Being cited in an AI Overview earns you fewer clicks than ranking #1 used to, because often the user gets their answer and never visits. That’s real, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. But the alternative isn’t the old world; the old world is gone either way. The alternative is being invisible in both. Being the cited source builds the kind of authority that pays off when someone does have a question big enough to click through for.
Final Thoughts
There are many ways to get traffic to your website or blog, but SEO is mostly free. Once you’ve optimized the keywords on your page and built credibility and authority by earning external links to it, this is traffic you don’t have to pay for. Depending on your industry, that could save you hundreds or thousands of dollars a month.
That said, SEO is neither a silver bullet nor easy. Do thorough keyword research to find the keywords you can plausibly compete for. Visibility drops off a cliff below the top handful of results. Page two is, as the old joke goes, the best place to hide a body. And that cliff has gotten steeper, not gentler: with AI Overviews now occupying the top of many results pages, a large and growing share of searches end without a click on anything at all. The traffic that remains concentrates at the very top. Ranking eleventh was never a strategy; today it’s barely a participation trophy.
One last thing: SEO takes time. Occasionally we work with a client who follows the simple SEO tips above and immediately jumps to the first page on Google. This is the exception and not the rule. It’s much more likely to take months (or even years) to reach the first page, especially if you’re a small business just starting out. Don’t let this discourage you, though! YOU CAN DO THIS. If your marketing budget allows, sign up for a rank tracking tool so that when you optimize a page you can see how it’s competing for your new keyphrase. Moz and SE Ranking are both still solid picks, but the category has churned a lot lately, so rather than freeze a recommendation into a blog post, we keep our current picks (and what each one is good for) up to date in our marketing toolkit.
Good luck! 🙂