Have you finished writing your blog post, edited, and want to publish it? Go over it once more before hitting publish. This is necessary because it is quite easy to overlook a few essential things. Sometimes you do get exhausted just by doing the keyword search, writing an optimised post, making an image, formatting etc. that you quickly want to hit publish. But wait a minute, that will not be the best thing to do. There is no rush to get people to read an incomplete post. Of course, we are not talking about perfection here; but at least it should be without some basic faults.
The thing to look out for before you publish your post is to make sure it is SEO optimised, so that the post can be crawled by the search engines for higher ranking and more traffic.
Blog Post Editing
- Before you write the post select the necessary keywords using Google or a keyword research tool and use them in the body of the post, the heading (H1) and subheadings, namely H2 and H3 etc.
- Write a great blog post title also using keywords.
- The paragraphs should be of reasonable length. 300 words recommended for each paragraph. This improves readability. Helps visitors who have little time to stay on the site.
- The main Keywords should be in the first line of the first paragraph of the post.
- Re-arrange paragraphs to follow an understandable sequence.
- Use a bulleted list to highlight items where possible.
- Try to make the post lengthy, putting in all the necessary facts or enough of it. 500-2000 words post is acceptable.
- Check the grammar and spelling in the post. Link to Grammarly or other grammar check tool
- The last paragraph should mention one or two of the main points.
- Add a call to action (CTA) in the post and at the end so visitors know what to do. A CTA is any action you ask visitors to take.
- Add tags and categories that organise posts together.
- Make sure you have placed it under the appropriate category.
- Proofread again check spelling mistakes.
Check for SEO.
7. Inside the Yoast SEO plugin, use the main heading as the focus keyword
Write a helpful ‘meta description’ using some of the main keywords. The meta description will be shown under the post title in the search results.
Check readability and grammar inside the Yoast SEO plugin.
Check the URL or permalink noting keywords and if there is the need to shorten it, do so.
8. Add a blog post image.
- Give the image an alt tag and title so it is optimised for SEO.
- It should be placed in the middle, left, or right as has been done for all other posts on your blog. Images should be relevant and as descriptive as possible.
- Link the new post to another post on the blog. This is internal linking and gives older articles new links. It also boosts SEO.
- You can also link from old posts to newer ones.
- Link each post to a related external website.
- Videos can also be added to a post. This helps to increase the rate of engagement .
- Learn how to embed videos in WordPress.
When you get used to doing this every time you write a post, it becomes the natural thing to do. You can create a checklist for that purpose to use as a reference.
After writing the draft, leave it for a day or some hours. When you come back to it, your mind will be refreshed or cleared, to see amendments you omitted in the first time draft .
If you have not been using a blog post checklist, it is time to start doing so.
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