Over the past several months I have collected a ton
of good resources about how to write a perfect blog post. And I thought
it’s better to do a mashup than simply rewriting/reposting what’s
already said in the blogosphere.
So, I will be focusing on writing a blog post that’s well optimized and that attracts search engine and social media love.
As
you probably know, there are a lot of bloggers who write really awesome
content but the problem is their blog posts are not so optimized. The
reason could be they don’t care about SEO much or they are not so
tech-savvy so they don’t know how to optimize their blog posts.
Hence
I believe that this blog post will also help the not so tech-savvy
bloggers (food blogs, personal
blogs) so that they can optimize their
existing and future blog posts to skyrocket the traffic.In A Nutshell: 21 Steps To Write A Perfect Blog Post
- Be Original. Be Yourself.
- Use Keywords Effectively.
- Write An Epic Title
- Write An Alternate Title And Make It Your H1 Tag
- Write A Good Introduction
- Use Sub-headings (H1 – H3 tags) & Bullet Points
- Use Block Quotes
- Competitor Analysis
- Write In-depth Articles
- Interlink Your Blog Posts
- Link Out To Other Blog Posts
- Write A Nice Meta Description
- Add Relevant Tags & Categories
- Make The URL Friendly & Optimized
- Use Relevant & Quality Images
- Optimize Images To Maximize Traffic
- Embed Audios & Videos
- Add Call To Action (CTA)
- Add Google Authorship
- Repurpose Content
- Keep Your Blog Posts Up-to-date
1. Be Original. Be Yourself.
It’s
okay to write a blog post about a news story that’s already blogged by
1,000 websites in your niche. The question is what makes your blog post
unique? Are you just rewriting what’s written in other blogs or are you
including your own views and ideas? If you’re adding value to your blog
posts in one way or the other then you’re on the right track. It doesn’t
matter if you have haters or if they’re criticizing your blog posts as
long as you’re right.
You
don’t really have to write a blog post daily only to engage your
readers. It may increase your traffic, your Alexa rank but that won’t
make you an awesome blogger. I would say write only if you have got
something nice to say.
2. Use Keywords Effectively
As
you probably know, keywords are search terms that people use to find
webpages and keyword research is the practice of finding the value of
those keywords. Keyword research is not required for all your blog posts but it’s very important when you’re writing an in-depth blog post or a tutorial.
So,
why is keyword research important? If your awesome blog post is missing
the important keywords then it means it’s not search optimized. Since
search engines use keywords (and of course other signals too) to
determine the relevancy of a page it’s important to include the keywords
that people will be using to find your blog post.
If you’re in a competitive niche then you should target long tail keywords
(keyword phrases that usually have 3 or more words in the phrase).
Because it’s easy to rank a webpage for a long tail keyword and the
traffic quality will also be great especially when you have a niche
blog.
3. Write An Epic Title
People
will read your title and that’s guaranteed but they don’t read your
blog post word-by-word unless they want to. So writing a powerful title
is the quickest way to grab the attention of your readers. Make sure
it’s less than 70 characters and it’s a good practice if the primary keywords that you’re targeting are at the beginning of the title.
Also,
if you’re #9 in Google for a keyword and if users are clicking on your
link (that is if your click through rate is high ) than the top 5 search
results position then your ranking will improve and eventually you may
end up in top 5.
If you’re bad at writing titles like me then give a try to Content Idea Generator by Portent or learn how to spin a title that’s already popular. I also recommend reading the advanced guide by Buffer about writing great titles on Twitter, Facebook, and Blog based on their research.
4. Write An Alternate Title And Make It Your H1 Tag
When
you have done an in-depth blog post after the necessary keyword
research and competitor analysis you can think about two titles (in fact
the 2nd one is the H1 tag). WordPress (and some other content
management systems) by default assumes that your Title tag and H1 are
the same and there’s no option to change it. Tip: What are
to
?
to
Tags
?
But
if you’re using Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin (or other SEO plugins) then
you can write a custom tag from your WordPress dashboard.
It’s useful when you want to write two versions of the same title – one
should be search optimized and other one should be user friendly.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">
If
your blog is an authority one then it won’t be a problem but otherwise
it’s somewhat difficult to write a title that’s both user-friendly and
search optimized. If it’s user-friendly then there’s less space to add
the targeted keywords and if it’s a search optimized title then it may
be boring to users.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">
And Google will either show
your Title tag or the H1 tag as the title of your blog post in search
result pages. In my blog the title that you’re seeing within the blog
post is actually the H1 tag and the title that you’re seeing on the task
bar (or your web browser tab) is the <title> tag. When people
share your blog post on social media it’s mostly the <title> tag.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">
5. Write A Good Introduction</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">
Introduction
is the next thing after the title that people actually read. If you
have a great introduction then most probably they will read your entire
blog post or at least scan it. You can summarize the whole blog post in
your introduction by telling what you’re writing about and why people
should actually read it.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">
Also, it’s important to
include the primary keywords that you’re targeting in the first few
paragraphs because that tells the search engines that your article is
about that keyword.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">
I
must admit that I suck at writing but I’m good in research (or at least
I believe that way) so I usually write to archive my mind or to share
the resources that I’ve collected over time. But I do refine the blog
posts regularly to make it as useful as possible.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">
6. Use Sub-headings (H1 – H3 tags) & Bullet Points</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">
Like
I’ve mentioned, people don’t actually read your blog posts they scan
through it. You’ve to make your blog posts more readable by using
subheadings and bullet points. Why? Because it improves the user
experience as it’s easier to read subheadings and bullet points than
just paragraphs.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">
And your readers will know what
they will get without reading the entire paragraphs. For example, you
split a single blog post into several sections using subheadings and
bullet points even if they’re closely related.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">
Use
heading tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6) effectively. H1 tag is the most
important and H6 is the least important heading in a page. And remember,
you can have multiple H2 – H6 tags but it’s a best practice to limit to
one H1 tag per page.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">
7. <b>Use Block Quotes</b></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">
I
love the block quotes feature in WordPress as it grabs the attention of
readers instantly (you have to customize your stylesheet accordingly). <a href="http://www.studiopress.com/design/how-to-use-block-quotes.htm" target="_blank"><b>Block quotes</b></a> can be used to show famous quotes or an excerpt from another web page or anything that you want to highlight.</p>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<blockquote>
<p>
This is an example block quote. You might have already noticed it. Haven’t you?</p>
</blockquote>
</div>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">
8. Competitor Analysis</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">
If
you’re writing something awesome and something that requires a lot of
effort then do some competitor analysis. Because that’s the only way to
tell whether you’re going to rank for the target keyword or not. If the
topic that you’ve planned is already covered on a ton of other blogs
then you have to make it even better to outrank your competitors.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">
Otherwise
ask yourself what makes you unique? Why your webpage should rank higher
on Google? If you believe that your content offers more value than your
competitors then it should rank higher someday (of course it takes time
and it depends upon several other factors like authority of your blog,
keyword competition, etc.).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">
For example, if it’s a
“Top X Tips” kind of post and if your competitor is listing up to 50
tips then you can do your research and make it a list of 100. Another
technique is regularly updating the content on your blog. It’s a good
practice to update your content to make it more relevant and fresh so
that it will become one of your evergreen content.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">
9. Write In-depth Articles</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">
Last year Google released a new feature called “<strong><a href="http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2013/08/discover-great-in-depth-articles-on.html" target="_blank">In-depth articles</a></strong>“.
The idea is to highlight quality in-depth content in Google search
results as their research indicated that 10% of users needed in-depth
content. So optimize your blog for the <strong><a href="https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/3280182?hl=en" target="_blank">“In-depth articles” feature</a></strong> and write in-depth articles whenever you can.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">
10. Interlink Your Blog Posts</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">
If
you want to increase the ranking of your blog posts then make sure that
your blog posts are interlinked. Internal linking not only means that
your pages must be reachable from your homepage but it also means that
the inner pages must be linking to each other. When you’re linking your
own internal pages you’re actually passing link juice to those pages
thereby increasing its ranking.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">
11. Link Out To Other Blog Posts</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">
Even
if you’re linking to a competitor it doesn’t mean that you won’t
outrank them. Since search engines use 100s of signals to rank a web
page so you may outrank your competitor even if you’re linking to them.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">
And
it doesn’t mean that when you’re writing a blog post you should link to
your competitor who has covered the same topic. If that is the case
then it means that you’re giving a vote to your competitor for the
current topic and it will boost their ranking.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">
Instead
you can use the following linking strategy. For example, this blog post
is about “How To Write A Blog Post” so as you can see I’m not linking
to any of those pages that are exactly about the same topic but I’ve
linked to a ton of other quality resources that’s highly relevant to the
context.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">
It’s
annoying if you’ve mentioned a website or reviewed a product but are
not willing to link to it. After all the web is all about links. We want
to offer the best user experience possible so feel free to link to
other websites.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">
12. Write A Nice Meta Description</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">
<strong><a href="http://moz.com/learn/seo/meta-description" target="_blank">Meta description tags</a></strong>
don’t impact your search engine rankings directly but they can
significantly improve the click-through-rate in search engine results
pages. If your blog post is missing the meta description tag then search
engines will automatically show an excerpt from your page.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">
But
if you write a meta description then search engines will show it when
it’s relevant to the context and ideally it should contain the keywords
that you are focusing on.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">
13. Add Relevant Tags & Categories</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">
Make
sure that you added the most relevant categories and tags to the blog
post so that your readers can easily find more interesting content in
the same topic on your blog.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">
14. Make The URL Friendly & Optimized</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">
People
may or may not pay attention to your URL (address of your blog post).
But still… it’s nice to make it friendly and readable. Use hyphens and
not underscores or spaces to separate keywords in your URLs. Also, I’ve
noticed that most SEOs don’t recommend the usage of <strong><a href="http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/S/stop_words.html" target="_blank">stop words</a></strong> in your URLs to save space.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">
I
would say write a URL that reflects the content of that page so that
even the naked URL itself becomes self-descriptive. I try to make my
URLs less than 60 characters or say less than 7 words including the
primary keywords that I’m focusing.</p>
</div>
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