Writing Blog Posts: The Basics
If you’ve just started your digital marketing campaign, you’re probably feeling a little over-whelmed by the learning curve. You know maintaining a blog can help, but you don’t really know the right way to do it. We’re here to help with our guide to the basics of writing blog posts.
Topic Selection
When choosing a blog topic, you want to consider your audience. Who’s going to be reading your blog? What sort of things might they want to read?
You can use Google Trend searches and similar programs to help you see in what your target audience is interested. The following questions are good to keep in mind when choosing a topic:
- Is the topic relevant to your blog?
- Is it relevant or outdated?
- Would this information be useful to your target audience?
- Would this post be appealing to your target audience?
If you’re at a loss, you can always look at what your competition or the leaders in your industry are posting for inspiration.
Keywords
Keywords are a crucial part to improving your blog’s SEO, which is the whole reason you’re adding a blog to your business’s website in the first place. When choosing your keywords, the main thing you want to keep in mind is the following question: What would you potential customers type in a search engine to find your business? There are various programs you can use to determine which keywords are trending best. You can also use Google Trends to help get a feel for which keywords are currently working and where.
Once you’ve determined around three keywords or so that fit with your post, it’s time to integrate them properly. If you use WordPress, you can install the Yoast plugin, which makes optimizing a breeze and guides you through the whole process. There’s both a free and paid version.
Formatting
Most people consider this part to be up to personal preference and tastes, but there are a few SEO standards for formatting that could help you boost your optimization even more. For instance, it’s helpful to have H2 (Heading 2) headers dividing up the written content; it improves readability and, with a keyword in them, gives Google something stronger onto which it can latch. I typically prefer roughly three headers for content that is around 500-600 words in length.
Adding pictures can also improve your readability, but the blog post needs to be balanced. Don’t bog your content down with too many pictures. We recommend either a picture per header or about every two paragraphs or so. This helps breakup the content, make it more aesthetically pleasing, and keeps it looking unified and professional.
Writing the Content
The content of your blog post is the most important part; it’s the meat and potatoes of the SEO meal you’ve worked so hard to prepare. There’s a few general SEO practices you should keep in mind for the written content, though most of that is left up to your discretion based on your preferences. Here’s a few things to keep in mind while writing your content.
- Make sure you’re using a variety of words, phrases, and sentences. You don’t, for example, want to have five or six sentences in short content that start the same way. Likewise, each paragraph should start a different way.
- For example: you don’t want to start each paragraph with a sentence that’s structured like “While ____, _____.” or “Not only ____, but also ___.”
- You can use your keyword too much. Programs like Yoast can help you make sure you’re using proper keyword density.
- Use a mix of sentences. While a bunch of short, choppy sentences looks unprofessional and even childish, too many long sentences can bore the reader and isn’t good for readability.
- Find a good balance between being conversational and informative. No one wants to be talked down to or to read things they don’t understand.
Blog Extras
There are quite a few extras involved in the SEO part of blogging, on which we will only touch briefly. It’s good SEO practice to place your keyword as close to the front of your title as possible, once in the slug, and once in the meta-description, also known as the ‘excerpt.’ You should also find a way to work in each keyword at least in one image’s title and alt description. Tags and categories help users to find your content and find what they’re looking for on your blog. (It’s also another opportunity to work in keywords and boost SEO even more.)
Blogs can help your business’s website get more traffic that actually sticks, but you have to do it right. Just posting any content that isn’t optimized at all won’t cut it. We hope our guide helped to put you on the right path to improve your website’s traffic through a fully optimized blog. If you find that it’s too difficult to maintain your blog or come up with good blog posts, you can hire a blog manager to help you. If you’re unsure about how much a blog manager can help you, check out our blog post on 10 reasons why you should hire one.