learning how to blog may seem easy at first, but blog writing isn’t as easy as you might think. It’s much more than just putting words on a page. You need to think about adding images, page load speed, user experience, grammar and spelling, SEO (will Google like what you write), engagement, formatting and so much more.
In this post, I’m going to instruct you how to blog better. I’ll show you my personal blog writing check-list that has helped us write better content, get much more traffic and help much more people with our website.
Before we get started, it’s essential that I discuss why you need to have a check-list before hitting the publish button on your newest blog post. think of the publish button like the launch button on a rocket. You can’t just hit it! You need to go over every part of your blog post to make sure that everything is ready to go before you send it into the universe.
By doing a full systems check before launch, you’ll give your blog post a better chance to be read, shared and to receive traffic from Google.
The first time Google bots crawl your site and find your newest article, they will also be checking it for the same things I’m going to list in this post. The much more green lights you get from Google on that first pass, the most likely you are to rank in search results and thus, get much more traffic.
Once you’ve written what you think is the ideal article, it’s imperative to go over it a few times to guarantee it’s ready to be published. follow this list of items in my check-list to make sure your short article is ready to go.
Note: for a much more extensive short article on writing the ideal blog post, including the blog design, how to choose a topic, how to choose a title, and how to write much more efficiently, have a look at our supreme guide to writing a blog post.
Here 5 steps you ought to take before hitting publish on your article:
✓ 1. Spell Check
After writing your blog post, you ought to check it for spelling and grammar errors. incorrect spelling and grammar will not only cause your readers to get annoyed and click away, but it will also harm your potential SEO. Google bots are sticklers for proper language so don’t make the mistake of hitting publish before checking your copy for errors.
There are a few WordPress plugins you can use to check grammar and spelling, but I don’t recommend using them. Prečo? having much more plugins implies your site has much more chances of getting hacked, running slower and being incompatible with future updates. rather than downloading a plugin to your WordPress blog, download the Grammarly browser extension instead (not a sponsor).
Once installed and activated, this extension will automatically underline any errors while you’re writing your blog post. simply click on the underlined words or phrases and Grammarly will discuss why it believes the selected copy to be erroneous and will offer adjustment suggestions.
?Productivity Tip: Learning how to blog is one thing, but learning how to blog efficiently is equally important! When you’re writing your blog post and you see that Grammarly is underlining potential errors, don’t fix them best away. Instead, finish writing the entire blog post and then go back and appropriate any errors. This will guarantee that you remain “in the flow” and don’t get too distracted along the way.
✓ 2. check Formatting
People who read blog messages are not like those who read novels and magazines. When you’re writing a blog post you need to think about how to blog for people who have incredibly short attention spans.
The average time spent reading a blog post on many sites is under 2 minutes. That’s because people simply want the fastest answer available. When web users surf the internet, they’re not doing it to gain large knowledge or to read flowery language, many of the time they’re simply searching for an answer and they want it fast.
To keep your readers’ attention, you need to format your blog so that it’s appealing to the eye. here are a few suggestions on how to blog for actual human beings online.
Break up main points with headings – Headings are also known as H2, H3, and H4 in WordPress. Not only are they good for blog post formatting, but they’re also great for SEO. Google uses these headings to guess what your blog post is about. Make sure you break up your main points with H2 headings, your subheadings with H3 and anything below that with H4. As you can see in this post, the large blue font near the top of the post says “Here 5 steps you ought to take before hitting publish on your article” is an H2, and each of the subheadings below says “✓…”. These are H3. By breaking up messages like this, itmakes them simpler to read.
No paragraphs longer than 4 lines – I may have broken this guideline ironically in my last paragraph, but as a guideline of thumb your paragraphs ought to be short. veľmi krátky. forget everything your high school English teacher taught you about paragraph structures. If your paragraph goes over 4 lines on a desktop screen or 7 on a mobile screen, it’s too long. add a space after one of the periods.
Break up text with photos – Every blog post ought to have photos. If you want to know how to blog without boring your readers, then photos are your answer. simply add a photo after every 3 or 4 paragraphs in your post. much more about photos below.
✓ 3. add Photos
There’s much more to adding photos to a blog post than just submitting your best images. First, you need to resize and compress the images so that your blog post will load as fast as possible on your site.
There are three ways to resize and compress photos. You can either do it before you submit using an app on your computer (iResize for Mac, office for PC), you can use sites like TinyJPG and CompressJPEG to resize images, or you can use a WordPress Plugin like Smushit or Imsanity.
For this, I do recommend using a plugin. We have used Smushit in the past and it works great as a totally free option. once installed and activated, you can make it so that each time you submit an image to your blog, Smush will automatically resize it to a smaller file size (I recommend no larger than 1000px across) and it will also compress the file.
You ought to have a photo after every 4 – 5 paragraphs in your post and you ought to also be sure to submit a featured image. A featured image will be shown at the top of your post in many WordPress themes.
A few things to think about when adding photos:
The size of the featured image is chose by your theme. check your theme settings in WordPress and make sure you submit the featured image in the proper dimensions for your theme.
All photos in the main content of your post (besides the featured image) ought to be uploaded no larger than 1,000 pixels broad and hopefully, after compressing them using the tools noted above, each photo is no larger than 500MB.
Every photo ought to have an “Alt Text”. To add alt text simply click on the photo in your WordPress Editor, then click the pencil or edit button on the photo. then you will see a place to write your alt text. Alt text ought to discuss the image and in some cases include the keyword you’re trying to rank for in SEO.
?Productivity Tip: While I do recommend using a plugin to compress and resize your images, this may not be the ideal service if you have a slower wifi connection as you’ll still have to submit the full-size file before the plugin can work je to kúzlo. This can take forever! If you have slow Internet or are travelling, I recommend using an app on your computer first before submitting it to the blog to save time.
✓ 4. pick a Category
Once you’ve written your post, it’s time to add it to a category. Every blog post ought to be under a category, that way your readers can find it in your blog archives and menu when searching around your website. It’s also acceptable to have a single blog post in multiple categories. For example, if you’re writing about budget travel in Africa, then you may put that post in your “Budget Travel” category, as well as your “Africa” category.
✓ 5. optimize For SEO
SEO is the single many essential essential to actually growing a successful blog. It’s great to learn how to blog, but if you’re not learning how to blog for SEO, then you’re essentially just treading water. By learning proper SEO strategies, you’ll be able to drive traffic to your blog quickly.
I’ll list a few of the most essential aspects of learning how to blog for SEO below, but there’s a lot much more to SEO than just writing better content and utilizing keywords. SEO is all about building authority links, creating pillar webs on your site and producing content on a schedule that Google will love.
To learn much more about proper SEO, check out our totally free SEO training Video. You can also read our recent messages all about our best SEO suggestions for bloggers.
For now, here are a few of the most essential things to keep in mind when learning how to blog and how to write better messages for SEO:
Keyword Research: before you even write a blog post, you ought to use a keyword research tool to help you choose a blog topic that people actually search for in Google. If you were to write a blog post called “My road trip around Europe” you might find that people search thv období iba 10 -krát mesačne v spoločnosti Google v priemere. Aj keď nahrávajte svoj príspevok „Najlepšie destinácie výletov v Európe“, možno zistíte, že 2 000 ľudí ho vyhľadáva v spoločnosti Google.
Plánovač kľúčových slov spoločnosti Google je úplne bezplatný nástroj na výskum kľúčových slov, ale je príliš obmedzený. Ak chcete brať SEO vážne, budete chcieť získať nástroj Pro ako Keysearch. Pomocou nášho pridruženého kódu „Goat20“ získate zľavu 20% a navyše pomôžete podporiť tento blog.
Kľúčové slovo v názve: Teraz, keď ste našli kľúčové slovo alebo esenciálnu frázu, ktorú tisíce ľudí skutočne hľadajú v spoločnosti Google, je čas umiestniť ho na všetky najlepšie miesta vo vašom blogovom príspevku. Prvý je v názve. Ako vo vyššie uvedenom príklade, ak je vaše kľúčové slovo „najlepšími destináciami výletov v Európe“, potom by to malo byť určite vo vašom názve. Nemusí to byť jediná vec v názve, napríklad je vaše kľúčové slovo iba „najlepšie destinácie výletov“. v názve.
Kľúčové slovo v prvej vete: Kľúčové slovo by sa malo vždy objaviť v prvej vete blogového príspevku. To pomáha spoločnosti Google a vaši čitatelia pochopiť, o čom bude príspevok o najlepšom preč.
Kľúčové slová v nadpisoch: Ako som hovoril skôr v tomto blogovom príspevku, používanie nadpisov (H2, H3, H4 atď.) Je nevyhnutné pre formátovanie a SEO. Vaše kľúčové slovo by sa malo objaviť aspoň raz v H2, H3 a H4 vo vašom blogovom príspevku. Vo vašom blogovom príspevku nie je potrebné používať H1, pretože WordPress automaticky používa H1 pre názov vášho blogového príspevku, ktorý, ako sme už vyššie uvedené, by malo obsahovať vaše kľúčové slovo.
Hustota kľúčového slova: Nikdy neprekonajte svoje kľúčové slovo do svojho blogového príspevku. Google je na to príliš inteligentný a môže vás skutočne penalizovať za to, že sa snažíte oklamať takýto systém. Namiesto toho vložte kľúčové slová čo najskôr v celom príspevku, všade, kde to príde prirodzene. Odporúča sa hustota kľúčových slov 0,5-1% (tj: ak je váš blogový príspevok 1 000 slov, potom by sa malo v kópii objaviť kľúčové slovo 5-10-krát).
Kľúčové slová v značkách ALT: Najmenej 10% vašich obrázkov by malo zahrnúť vybrané kľúčové slovo do značky ALT. Nikdy nepridávajte kľúčové slovo do všetkých značiek ALT, ale jeho pridanie do jednej alebo dvoch vašich fotografií je skvelé pre SEO.
Napíšte silnú meta: Meta popis je text, ktorý sa zobrazuje vo výsledkoch vyhľadávania pod názvom vášho blogového príspevku. Upravte svoj popis meta blogu a uistite sa, že naláka čitateľa, aby klikli na váš príspevok, zatiaľ čo ste aspoň raz zahrnuli kľúčové slovo zaostrenia.
Prepojenie: Po zverejnení vášho príspevku by ste mali ísť do všetkých svojich ďalších relevantných správ na vašom webe a odkazovať na nový príspevok. Je to ľahký krok, na ktorý mnohí blogeri zabudli, ale môže drasticky zlepšiť vaše šance na získanie návštevnosti vašich nových príspevkov, a to z iných správ na vašich stránkach aj od spoločnosti Google.
Spätná väzba: Dobrý SEO je o zadržaní, ale robí to etickým, bez spammy. V našom výcviku SEO veľa poučíme o spätnom podstúpení, takže si to nenechajte ujsť. V podstate sa budete chcieť dostať na webové stránky iných ľudí, ktoré odkazujú späť na váš nový blogový príspevok. Pomôže vám to zaradiť sa do spoločnosti Google a tiež zvýši návštevnosť z iných stránok.
Aktualizácia a vylepšenie: Žiadny blogový príspevok nie je nikdy „hotový“. Google miluje, keď sa vrátite a aktualizujete starší obsah. Každých pár mesiacov by ste sa mali vrátiť späť k svojim špičkovým správam a vylepšiť ich všade, kde je to možné. Pridajte oveľa užitočnejší obsah. Pridajte mapy, ceny, čokoľvek môžete, aby ste sa uistili, že príspevok je taký dobrý, ako môže byť, pridajte text, ktorý hovorí niečo ako „aktualizovaný august 2020“.
„Tip na produktivitu: Využite doplnok Yoast SEO. Aj keď doplnok Yoast SEO pre WordPress by nemal byť vaším jediným odkazom na dobré písanie blogov SEO, je dobré začať. Toto spojené s návrhmi i t