February 28, 2017
by Jessica Kane
Content is king, and blogs often make the best castles. Unfortunately, many people struggle to consistently write the type of high-quality content that attracts and holds readers, and stands out in search. These five tips can help you more dependably write outstanding content for your blog.
Organize Your Content
Poorly organized content is difficult to follow, and it isn’t appealing. It’s essential each paragraph remains on topic. A great way to do this is to create an outline of the paragraphs in your article before you start writing it. This will also help you to place the paragraphs in the right order.
Write A Catchy Title
Potential visitors to your website may see your title before they visit, and the title will often determine whether or not they click through to your post. The title of the blog post should tell potential readers that your content is important, unique, interesting, or essential for the reader to know. It should also, of course, provide an accurate summary of your content. Use tools like the Emotional Value Headline Analyzer and the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer to help you craft more effective post titles.
Break Up The Text
Blog visitors won’t read a wall of text even if the content is interesting. Try to keep paragraphs relatively short. Break up the post with subheadings. These subheads should be designed to draw the reader in. Where applicable, present content in a list format or use bullet points.
Make It Search-Friendly
Even the best content won’t attract people to your blog if they can’t find it. Search optimize your content to help it rank highly in the search results of major search engines. For a business blog, consider hiring an SEO professional. For a personal blog, there are some basic tips that can improve your search rankings.
Always pay attention to the keywords in your article. Aim for a keyword density of 1-3%. Place your most important keyword phrase at the beginning of your posts meta title. It’s also important to include a compelling meta description—a 150-160 character summary of your content. While it doesn’t directly impact search rankings, a meta description can help “sell the click” to draw in visitors from search results.
Include Statistics
If possible, include concrete, quantifiable facts in your blog. This shows visitors your blog is a reputable source of information, which can keep them coming back. If you include a statistic or provable fact in the title, it can draw visitors to follow the link to your blog from the search results. Blogs that have provable facts or numerical statistics tend to get 206% more traffic than those that don’t.
This post originally appeared on the Webbiquity blog.
Photo credit: Unsplash Oliver Thomas Klein
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