Best Practices When Writing Blog Posts
Writing blog posts can be a valuable method of directing traffic to your website. Not only creating new customers but also providing shareable social content that in turn (you guessed it) diverts traffic back to your website. However, for blog posts to convert and positively engage an audience. As well as search engines, they should follow some general guidelines. In this post we talk through some best practices for writing blog posts. Providing you with a tool kit to create engaging and beneficial posts that positively impact your online marketing strategy.
Ten Best Practices When Writing Blog Posts
This is a topic we’re passionate about as there are so many things to consider when writing quality blog posts that engage well. It was hard to only choose ten. But after careful consideration, here are a list of our most favoured best practices when writing blog post that rank highly and create engagement. We believe these provide a great starting point to help you create relevant and considered blog posts. Positively impacting your online presence.
Keep an eye on this post, as we may add to it down the line but for now, let’s get started!
Considering Your Title
Title is important to consider when writing your blog post as it not only hooks the reader, encouraging them to read on. But also demonstrates to search engines the specific focus of your post. Search engines are looking for posts that are specific and niche to a single topic. So your title should be a topic you come back to throughout the post and repeat several times. Not only in the title but in the body of your posts content. This shows search engines that the topic is relevant and that the post is consistent.
A search engines purpose is to present users with the most relevant results that match their search phrases. So considering topics that your ideal customers are searching for is important. The more specific your post is to that topic and those key phrases then the higher it will rank and more likely be found by those ideal customers. What topic’s or questions would your ideal customers be searching for? How can you fulfil those needs by creating posts that answer those questions?
Shorter Sentences Are Best
Something that can be a challenging transition when writing web content over offline content is the adaptions to sentence length. When writing good web copy it’s important to keep sentences short and concise. It’s not what we learn in school. However it does greatly improve your SEO rankings as it makes your post more readable to a larger audience.
Consider Twitter for example. With it’s short word count for posting it ensures that information is bitesize and to the point. Writing sentences for blog posts should follow the same structure. There will be longer sentences within your posts as you can’t always provide the same degree of descriptive information in short sentences. However it’s best practice to consider reducing length for at least 30% of your sentences. While ensuring that they also read well to an audience and not just search engines.
Post on Your Blog Regularly
It can be hard to keep up with posting on your blog when you’re busy running your business. We completely get it. But sometimes posting on your blog is the very thing that moves the needle in gaining more engaged customers or new leads. Not only does writing regular blog posts provide you with more shareable social content – which is a big win! Creating a regular posting schedule also helps you rank higher with search engines by showing that your website is relevant and consistently updated.
Like everything, what gets scheduled gets done. So do block out a few hours in your calendar regularly to write blog content. At an absolute minimum you should aim to create a new blog post every month. We understand that for some business owners this seems like and impossible task, or that writing engaging content just isn’t within your zone of genius. Here at Primal Space we offer content writing as part of our website development services.
Link to Relevant Pages or Services on Your Website
Now that you’ve generated traffic to your post, you want to keep readers engaged with your website and it’s content. Linking to other posts that you’ve written demonstrates a level of authority and expertise. As well as providing further reading on a topics that may be too in-depth to go into detail on in the current post. When writing your blog posts it’s worth considering where these crop up and keep note of them for future blog writing. Sometimes the easiest way to do this is to save the post title as a draft in the admin area of your website. Providing something to come back to on days where you’re feeling less inspired.
Within a post it’s also important to link to your relevant services as this will provide further authority on the information you’re providing. The key word here being relevant. It can sound really spammy if you’re packing all services into every post and can actually put off your readers. But linking to a service within the body of your post and providing a call to action at the end can be a good way to keep an engaged audience within your funnel and also perform an action. Whether that be sharing your post or contacting you about a specific service.
Be sure to also link to your new post from existing posts within your blog. We can’t emphasis enough the power of internal linking throughout your site. By linking new posts to existing posts that are ranking well can be really beneficial. Learn more helpful hints and tips on how to drive traffic to your website.
Include a Few Images
Images are a great way to break up large bodies of text while also keeping your audience engaged. It can be tempting to throw in any old image, however it’s important to keep them relevant to the topic at hand. Images are emotive and help people connect on a deeper level. Consider the relevance of Instagram for example, a social platform that (until fairly recently when they introduced reels) was founded upon sharing images primarily.
Images shouldn’t detract from your blog post but should instead compliment it. Gone are the days of dark fuzzy images on blogs, they really let a site down and can make it feel less professional. As always quality is important and with modern smart phones, it’s never been easier to capture bright, high resolution images from your phone at the touch of a button. But if you’d prefer to leave the photography to the professionals like we do, you can always find free images online that are ideal for blog content on digital image library’s such as Unsplash and Pexels. You can learn more on how to find free stock images in our recent blog post that covers this topic in more detail.
Top tip, be sure to use your key words from your title / headings as the names of your images. Change these before uploading and set the alt tag for the image as the same name. It goes in your favour from an SEO standpoint and further relays to search engines that your topic is consistent and on point.
Be Mindful of Word Count
A really important aspect of writing blog posts is ensuring that they hold enough content to be considered valuable by search engines. It can be tempting to write lots of very short posts. However this tactic never translates well in the world of SEO. Blog posts should be 300 words at an absolute minimum. However longer posts (2000 words or more) often rank best because they show that you are an expert on a topic or field. Post that rank higher receive exposure from a larger audience, making them more likely to be shared by the masses. Therefore generating a wider audience overall.
We realise that it’s not always going to be possible to write 2000+ word posts on a regular basis. However it’s worth considering a few topics that you could go all in on and writing blog post centred around these. Particularly if they’re evergreen topics that can be shared on your social pages time and time again, adding value to your audience.
Use Effective Tags
Another best practice when writing blog posts is including tags. These are similar to hashtags in that they provide key words that demonstrate the main points within the post. Depending on the length of your post will depend on the number of tags you link. Tags help readers identify the key topics and also find other posts within your site linked to that specific topic. making them a great way to provide internal linking and an engaged audience. Tags are most effective when they’re relevant to the topics covered and services that you wan to draw attention to within your niche so do use these mindfully.
Using Relevant Headings
When writing blog posts heading should be relevant to the topic and also break the post down into smaller more manageable chunks. Online readers rarely read posts in full. Making it important that the key elements stand out upon first glance. If headings are relevant and engaging you’ll be more likely to hook them to continue reading further. As a result spending more time engaging with your site and it’s content – this is also bonus points for search engines!
It’s also important to return to the title and the key phrase you’re targeting within the post when creating headers. Making variations of your title phrase a header with an H2 or H3 tag within the body of the post further cements the relevance to search engines that are scanning your sites content.
Write Meta Descriptions
Firstly a meta description is the block of text that shows a preview of the post on search engines. It’s essentially the snippet that leads to an audience clicking on your post and being directed to your site – or not! Meta descriptions are just as important as title, yet many people over look these valuable tools. Either writing very little or disregarding meta description completely.
Ensuring this field on your blog post admin area is filled with relevant and engaging content is extremely important. With only 160 characters available, it’s about keeping the information accurate and to the point. What is your post about? What should your audience expect to take away from your post? What’s the hook that will move them forward and click to read on your website?
Use Yoast SEO to Stay on Track
A great tool that we always recommend to WordPress clients for tracking your contents SEO performance is Yoast SEO. The plugin helps optimise your websites pages to drive more traffic from Google and other search engines. As well as increasing your websites overall engagement. The simple traffic light system shows you when you’re on track, writing search engine friendly blog posts and content. As well as providing areas that have room for improvement.
We use Yoast on all our our WordPress clients websites, helping them to create efficient content that converts well. You can learn more about Yoast SEO for WordPress in our in depth guide here on our website. Or contact us if you’d like to learn more about our SEO services.
Blog Post Writing Best Practices
We hope this has given you confidence in some of the best practices when writing blog posts. Allowing you to create higher value content that will better serve your business and your ideal customers. Writing blog posts gets easier with practice. Having a system and knowing that your posts are serving a greater purpose. As opposed to just being an online newsletter format, can really help you get the most out of them.
If you’re stuck on finding topics then consider how you can solve problems for your ideal customer. Can you provide tutorials and guides similar to this one but in your own niche? Or can you educate them on a topic that aligns with the services you provide? Your ideal customers will be more likely to find you online. By creating valuable content that’s shareable and following these blog writing best practices. You can also refer to another post within our blog for a more in depth technical guide on creating and editing posts in WordPress admin area.
If you’d like to discuss how we can support you then contact us and share your digital requirements. You can learn more about our services here on our website.
If you’ve successfully used this to create your own posts then do reach out to us and share your experiences. We love hearing how our guides and tutorials have helped our clients.