Page Text: 10 Simple Edits That'll Instantly Improve Any Piece of Writing
9. Add images and other media elements to support your ideas.
When you're finished checking for grammar, shift your focus to adding other elements to the blog post than text. There’s much more to making a good blog post than copy, here’s some following elements to add in support of your ideas:
Featured Image
Choose a visually appealing and relevant image for your post. As social networks treat content with images more prominently, visuals are more responsible than ever for the success of your blog content.
For help selecting an image for your post, read " How to Select the Perfect Image for Your Next Blog Post " and pay close attention to the section about copyright law.
Visual Appearance
No one likes an unattractive blog post. And it's not just pictures that make a post visually appealing — it's the formatting and organization of the post, too.
In a well-formatted and visually-appealing blog post, you'll notice that header and sub-headers are used to break up large blocks of text — and those headers are styled consistently.
Here's an example of what that looks like:
Screenshots should always have a similar, defined border so they don't appear as if they're floating in space — that style should stay consistent from post to post.
Maintaining this consistency makes your content look more professional and easier on the eyes.
Topics and Tags
Tags are specific, public-facing keywords that describe a post. They also allow readers to browse for more content in the same category on your blog. Refrain from adding a laundry list of tags to each post. Instead, put some thought into a blog tagging strategy.
Think of tags as "topics" or "categories," and choose 10-20 tags that represent all the main topics you want to cover on your blog. Then stick to those.
10. Upload your post into your CMS.
You filled out your blog post with all the optimized content you can, now is the time to publish it in your content management system.
You can opt to post your content immediately, save it as a draft, or schedule when you want it to be posted live in case you adhere to a posting schedule.
11. Determine a conversion path (what you want your audience to do next).
A conversion path is a process by which an anonymous website visitor becomes a known lead. It sounds simple enough, but creating an effective conversion path requires a clear understanding of your target audience and their needs.
Having a conversion path is important because when you share your content on the web, you should have an idea of what your audience should do next, or in other words, provide them with a path forward.
The HubSpot Flywheel model is a great example of this as it shows how our organization gains and maintains leads.
12. Add calls to action to guide your audience to take action.
Call to action (CTA) are a part of a webpage, advertisement, or piece of content that encourages the audience to do something. You can add them to your blog post to guide your reader with “next steps” or a conversion path.
Different types of call to actions include asking readers to:
Subscribe to your newsletter to see when you publish more content.
Join an online community in your blog domain.
Learn more about a topic with downloadable content.
Try something for free or discount to convert readers to customers.
To get a better idea of how to make a CTA that readers want to click, we have a whole list of effective call to action examples for you to check out.
13. Link to other relevant blog posts within your content.
When you’re completing your blog post, you should link relevant content throughout it. An effective way to do this is to link within the same content cluster.
Keeping relevant content throughout your post can provide your readers with more helpful information, and potentially boost search engine rankings with corresponding longtail keywords .
But we’ll talk more about how to improve your ranking in the next step.
14. Optimize for on-page SEO.
After you finish writing, go back and optimize the on-page elements of your post.
Don't obsess over how many keywords to include. If there are opportunities to incorporate keywords you're targeting, and it won't impact reader experience, do it. If you can make your URL shorter and more keyword-friendly, go for it. But don't cram keywords or shoot for some arbitrary keyword density — Google's smarter than that!
Here's a little blog SEO reminder about what you should review and optimize:
Write your meta description.
Meta descriptions are the descriptions below the post's page title on Google's search results pages. They provide searchers with a short summary of the post before clicking into it. They are ideally between 150-160 characters and start with a verb, such as "Learn," "Read," or "Discover."
While meta descriptions no longer factor into Google's keyword ranking algorithm, they give searchers a snapshot of what they'll get from reading the post and help improve your clickthrough rate from search.
Optimize your page title and headers.
Most blogging software uses your post title as your page title, which is the most important on-page SEO element at your disposal. But if you've followed our formula so far, you should already have a working title that will naturally include keywords or phrases your target audience is interested in.
Don't over-complicate your title by trying to fit in keywords where they don't naturally belong. With that said, if there are clear opportunities to add keywords you're targeting to your post title and headers, feel free to take them. Also, try to keep your headlines short — ideally, under 65 characters — so they don't get truncated in the search engine results.
Consider anchor text best practices as you interlink to other pages.
Anchor text is the word or words that link to another page — either on your website or on another website. Carefully select which keywords you want to link to other pages on your site because search engines take that into consideration when ranking your page for certain keywords.
It's also important to consider which pages you link to. Consider linking pages that you want to rank for a specific keyword. You could end up getting it to rank on Google's first page of results instead of its second page — and that isn’t small potatoes!
Write alt text for all of your images.
Alt text conveys the “why” of an image as it relates to the content of your blog post to Google. By adding alt text correlating to the topic clusters and keywords of the post, Google can better direct users’ searches to you.
Check that all images are compressed for page speed.
When Google crawls different websites, a page’s load speed holds weight in page ranking. Make sure the images you include throughout the page aren’t unnecessarily large to shorten the duration it takes to load.
Use apps like Squoosh to minimize the size of your images without losing the quality.
Ensure that your blog post is mobile friendly.
More than 60% of organic visits are carried out on a mobile device. As such, having a website with a responsive design is critical. In addition to making sure your website's visitors (including your blog's visitors) have the best experience possible, optimizing for mobile will score your website some SEO points.
15. Publish and promote the blog post.
Share your post across all the marketing channels in your repertoire. The further the reach, the more of a possibility that readers will find it.
Channels to expand your blog post promotion strategy include:
Social Media Marketing : Sharing your content on the most popular social media networks like Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
Email Marketing : Sharing the newest post with your email subscribers to find.
Word of Mouth Marketing : Actively influencing people to read your content organically.
16. Track the performance of the blog post over time.
Your post is published for the world to see, make sure you’re keeping an eye on its performance over time so you can see if your blog post strategy is working well enough for your goals.
There’s a plethora of website traffic analysis tools that you can take advantage of to better understand your audience’s behavior on your blog posts.
Ready to blog?
Blogging can help you build brand awareness, become a thought-leader and expert in your industry, attract qualified leads, and boost conversions. Follow the steps and tips we covered above to begin publishing and enhancing your blog today.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in October 2013 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
Originally published Jan 21, 2022 7:00:00 AM, updated April 11 2022
Topics:
Don't forget to share this post!
Related Articles