Posts are the lifeline of a blog. This is what makes a blog different from others. This is what brings in the traffic and makes sure they return for more. But, what makes a perfect blog post? What are the factors you need to look after when planning for your next post? Let me share some of the tips I learned from following blogging gurus and content marketers like John Chow, Darren Rowse and Jeremy Schoemaker.
The process begins when you start planning for a post and finishes when you hit the publish button. Your post is as good as you carry it out. We can split the process in three phases.
1. Planning and Researching
As I told you, the process starts when you start planning for your next blog post. After you decide your topic, you should start researching on that. Gather as much data as possible before you start writing your post.
2. Creating the content
Here comes the most important part, creating your content. I am not talking about the quality as it varies author to author. I am talking about formatting the content so that it grabs the attention of both human visitors as well as the search engine spiders. A good post should have at least three paragraphs; introduction to the subject, description to clearly describe the subject and then conclude the subject.
Then it comes to enrich and styling the content with proper tags. Yes, tags like h1, h2 and h3 can do wonders. It not only makes your post looks great, but also helps search engines to find the important sections within the content. Therefore, it is a good practice to put subheadings for your paragraphs and wrap them in h2 or h3 tag depending on the nesting of subheading.
Do not over style your content with bolded, italic or colored words as that might hurt eyes of human visitors and will decrease the content to code ratio.
I use SEOPressor Plugin that helps me to improve the quality of my post by suggesting changes in real time while I am posting my content.
3. Posting the Content
The way you post your content also matters. I mean, if you are using WordPress you can choose a better permalink, a better keyword rich title and add meta descriptions. Well, some of those aren’t default WordPress functionality, but plugins like All in One SEO or Yoast SEO can do it for you.
Having quality and properly formatted content getting more and more important after Google introduced the Over Optimization Penalty. You can afford having little onpage optimization (or no optimization at all) but the quality of your posts should be high. All you need is content that search engines love.
Abhik shares SEO News and Affiliate Marketing Tips on his blog ItsAbhik.com. Subscribe to his Newsletter and get 3 Make Money Online eBooks.