Are you afraid to miss something important when writing your blog post? Or maybe don’t yet know all the subtleties of making good and noticeable blog posts? No need to worry, we’ve got your back covered.
Call them cheat-sheets, check-lists, or however your heart pleases, these mini-tasks can serve as a perfect guide to making your blog post comfortable and informative for both you and crawling machines by search engines. We have already covered most of information provided here in other separate blog posts, so this will be a bring-together from across different articles that you can take a look at if you want to find more detailed information.
-
Title Tag
Selecting an appropriate title means more than beginners can imagine. This title is responsible for some 90% of traffic that will come to your page, as it is the first thing both people and search engines look at when evaluating your post.
- Catchy?
Research has shown that magnified titles containing phrases like “Top 12”, “Most important” or “Best practice of” are more likely to get clicked on by public. Such is human psychology! We always want to be sure we spend time on the most important and useful things.
- Keywords
Before starting to write your wonderful piece of blog post, you need to make sure you have decided what you will write about. If so, choosing appropriate keywords will come by itself, but still spending some time in Google Adwords or just searching for similar results over the internet will be quite useful. After choosing keywords it is really advised to include them in the title of your blog post, as close to the beginning as you can.
- Length
Optimal Title Tag length for #SEO is maximum of 55-60 symbols, as on SERP all characters coming after that length will not be visible, and ellipsis (“…”) will appear instead.
Note: For going into more details on SEO and title optimization check out earlier posted article “The Title is the Top SEO Component”.
-
Description Tag
In spite of not affecting search engine ranking, these tags are the second thing that will be visible to people on Search Result Page, and can be the reason for people clicking on your link and opening your blog post.
- Catchy?
The whole purpose of including description tags is to ensure people understand what to expect from your page once they click on it. Make it clear and appealing, maybe give a brief summary of the whole blog post, but be sure they will still have a reason to click on your link.
- Keywords
Just like in the title, optimizing your description tag must definitely involve (appropriately) including your keywords.
- Length
Again, just like with the title tag, SERP cannot display the whole meta tag (i.e. description tag) of your blog post. Description tags exceeding 160 symbols will not be seen, so the optimal length is 150 – 160 symbols.
- <H1> tag
Wrapping the title in H1 tag is quite a useful part of on-page Search Engine Optimization of your blog post. This will make your title tag more visible for your blog visitors, but also will play some role in increasing your ranking on Google or other searching engines.
Note: since tags and descriptions are quite a serious matter that cant be discussed fully in 150 words, you can find out more by reading more right now in blog post “Categories and Tags : the ExpressCurate Approach”.
Now this is the main reason you started researching on optimizing your blog post – to make sure your article is making the most it can by its structure and optimization.
- Catchy?
Even if you can somehow get away with having a standard and not modified title or description tag, and got visitors to your blog post, there is no way they will stay on your page if the content is poorly written, too (in)formal, or just boring. Making it catchy is the only way to keep the readers.
- Keywords
Now this is probably the most important part of your blog post.
The first paragraph or two (depending on length) are the given the most value, and most include as many keywords as possible without doing unnecessary keyword stuffing. Ideally, your keywords will not be too general, and the percentage of them in the text will be between 3-5%. Not all of your keywords must keep that density, but keeping the primary ones within the limit must not be very difficult, as you concentrate your keywords on the idea of the whole text.
Once again, taking a look at what Google Adwords offers, and what other websites and blog posts over the internet suggest can result in wider range of useful keywords.
- Subheadings, numbered lists and bullet points
Though not presenting any SEO value, reading or going through blog post is much easier when its sections are divided according to categories or made lists of. Breaking paragraphs into smaller ones and separating the main ideas takes off the impression of having a heavy, lengthy content before you, and people are more likely to go through the blog post.
- Call To Action
What every blog posts needs is a proper call to action. This can be by encouraging comments (“Have something to add? Post below!”, “Do you agree with this point of view? Let us know in the comment section below!” etc), through decreasing bounce rate (“for more information check out our article XYZ”), or increasing conversion rate (“ready to purchase? Buy our product XYZ by half price now!”). There isn’t a more effective way to initiate your blog post visitors to act than to tell them to do so.
Note: you can find out more on the matter reading the article “Content Marketing Through the Perfect Blog Post”.
-
Images
Visuals of all kinds (videos, infographics, images, gifs) enhance user experience providing more value to visitors, and can also enhance the SEO rankings, but only if done right.
- Original images
No one disagrees that including images in your blog post can make it appear better both to you and crawling machines. However, not everybody understands that downloading them from Google, or other stock images can actually hurt your ranking. Using original, custom-made images and banners will take away some time from you or your graphic designer, but will definitely not harm your rankings if done well. You can use different paid and free tools available on the internet for creating your unique graphic.
- Keywords
Also known as Alternative Text and Image description tag, Alt Text serves mostly for Search Engine Crawlers that yet can’t differentiate what is in your uploaded image. Describe your image by assigning here your keywords, and you have helped yourself a bit more.
- Size and responsiveness
You need to understand that people will visit your blog post and blog in general from different types of devices that vary in their screen sizes. Those on their computers or laptops can minimize, make smaller or larger your page, and if your image starts covering your text, does not display the necessary information, or is just badly deformed, you have not paid enough attention to your images’ responsiveness. What you need to do at once is find how several lines of HTML and CSS can enhance User Experience at once.
-
Links
Permalinks (URL), shortened links, outbound and inbound links should not be omitted as well.
- Permalinks
Before publishing your blog post make sure the permalink is optimized. Do you have a random combination of letters and numbers after your domain, or category followed by a subcategory? Separate your posts in a logical way, and make the path appear easier both for humans and crawling machines.
- Outbound links
When writing information based on real data by a famous and trustworthy source, linking back to the original will only enhance your ranking, and should not be omitted. The only thing to keep in mind is making the link open up in a separate tab so you don’t lose your public.
- Inbound links
Have a high bounce rate (i.e. people close your blog after reading only the first blog post)? One way to decrease the bounce rate and keep the visitors exploring your blog is by making inbound links to other blog posts you have written that can be of interest to your readers. And again, make the post open in a new tab.
- Shortened links
Shortening your links can be a good strategy as you share your blog post on, let’s say, Twitter, where limited characters can fit a tweet. In spite of the common misconception that shortening your links (and thus not having your original domain name visible) harms your rankings by search engines, this is still quite a common strategy that does not require any hard input. All you have to do is go to any URL shortening website (be it Google URL Shortener, Bitly, or any other website of your convenience, and generate a free shortened version of your blog post URL.)
Note: If you want to find out more information on SEO for your page, don’t hesitate to read “On-page SEO: Making Your Page Perfect”.
-
Final Steps
After you have written your blog post, I bet you are sure it is time to upload your article! But wait, there are still some minor details that must be paid attention to. First of all, you need to decide when to post it.
After publishing your blog post, don’t forget to make the Google Crawler go over your page and index it by entering your permalink in the Search Console.
As for posting on social media, you can relate to detailed information provided by ExpressCurate on Pinterest, Facebook , Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. Having social media widgets in your blog for fast sharing can also be a great idea.
And don’t forget about following how your blog post is doing! Different metrics and analytic are available for any type of a budget, and though it may seem a boring thing to do, you still need to find out what techniques work better for your blog posts. So don’t procrastinate and read “4 Major Metrics That Matter for Content Marketing Strategies”, as it can show you that metrics are not as boring and useless as they might seem.
Keeping a blog is not only about sharing with what you love, but requires some other unskippable steps that must be taken to be found.
Some WordPress plugins like ExpressCurate aim at easing the process of making your blog post by explicitly showing which sections are not yet completed and setting optimized characters’ length as well as easy scheduling.
Hopefully this cheat-sheet helped you with the main concepts and algorithms behind having a successful blog post, and you will be able to go deeper into optimizing your content by reading the articles mentioned in this post. Good luck!
