Keys To A Good Blog Post: What You Should Be Looking For

Today, good SEO requires excellent content. One of the most common types of content is the blog post. However, there’s more to blogging than just inputting some text into a WordPress textbox and sprinkling in your keywords; many factors contribute to creating a blog post that supports your website’s SEO goals instead of hindering them.

The components needed depend on your end goal. Do you want to entertain or educate your audience, or perhaps both? Is there another purpose for your blog post? The answer to these questions will influence your approach to blogging.

Although blogging campaigns can vary in size and complexity, there are universal elements that go into creating any good blog post, regardless of the size, scope or end goal. Here are a few things to consider:

1 – SEO

A proper discussion of blogging as an SEO tool must address the relationship between SEO and blogging. The best blog writers — professionals who do this for a living — will tell you that they’re more than just writers but SEO marketing experts too. Today, it’s just as crucial to know how to attract the right audience to your content as it is to write that content in the first place. That means blogging is fundamentally about SEO.

Bloggers need to stay up-to-date with SEO developments to keep their content visible. This involves staying aware of SEO standards, such as keyword density, meta-tagging techniques, inbound and outbound linking requirements, and anything else that keeps Google satisfied (or at least avoids its wrath).

Simultaneously, the best bloggers understand that writing for humans, not search algorithms, is essential. If you’re not using natural language in your blogs because you’re solely focused on hitting keyword requirements, you’re doing your readers a disservice. Furthermore, Google and other search engines are getting better at detecting artificial keyword-stuffing every day, so it’s best to stick to natural language — even if it makes incorporating those keywords more challenging.

2 – Images, Video, or Both

Humans are visual creatures. A significant portion of our perceptions are processed through our eyes, making video or still images highly popular for retaining readers’ attention when it comes to blog content. To capture as much attention as possible, it’s an excellent idea to incorporate a good balance of visual content into blog posts to maintain reader engagement and enthusiasm.

What’s the right amount of image and video content? Most online publications, except for the most academic ones, will use at least a header image to accompany a new blog post title. This is the minimum standard for integrated multimedia. Such an image should be not only directly related to the blog topic but also designed to hook the reader, enticing them to click through and read the entire post.

At the same time, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. Generally, it’s inadvisable to have more than one image per post subheading unless providing graphical data. Additionally, video content should be treated as the focal point of your post, so including more than one embedded video can detract from that. Finally, neglecting to meta tag images or embedded videos can negatively impact your blog post’s SEO, so thoroughness is key.

3 – Content

Here’s the crucial aspect: you won’t have a compelling blog post unless the written content is up to par. Regardless of the topic, your content needs to be insightful, relevant, and captivating. To achieve this, you must ensure you have all the necessary facts at your disposal.

If you don’t research thoroughly, you risk making embarrassing mistakes that will discredit you as a blogger, which is precisely what you want to avoid. This means you’ll need more than Wikipedia entries to support your argumentative points. Be sure to attribute any sources you use. Plagiarism is a serious issue in online blogging, so protect yourself and your reputation.

4 – Link it All

Guess what? Your blog doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s also not going to benefit you if visitors to your site don’t know you have new blog content ready to be consumed unless it’s linked somewhere, such as on your social media feed. In other words, if you’re not interconnected with the rest of the internet, it doesn’t matter how excellent your content is or how stunning your professionally-designed website appears.

That’s why link building has become such an essential aspect of SEO. If your website doesn’t have a robust network of both inbound and outbound links, search engines won’t prioritise your content as highly as content from sites with better link networks. In other words, you need to ensure your content is linked to other content across your site and that you also have links leading away from your site.

5 – Call to Action

A well-told story is great, but not without a satisfying conclusion. You’ve got to finish with a bang, which means you’ll need a strong call to action that reinforces your blog post’s central point or call to action. This CTA can take various forms depending on your content and the goal for your post, but omitting a CTA will leave your entire blog feeling flat and incomplete.

Your CTA should align with your end goal. If you’re seeking engagement from your audience, explicitly ask for comments on the blog post that you can then respond to and initiate a discussion. If you’re promoting a specific service or a business partner, your CTA should include an outbound link to a sales funnel or capture page. Even a simple request to “like and share this post” on social media constitutes a CTA.

6 – Ticking All the Boxes

Meeting all these requirements makes writing an effective blog a challenging task from an SEO standpoint. It’s not easy to address all aspects, such as providing engaging content, keeping up with link building, keyword and meta management, and multimedia inclusion, but getting it right can be incredibly rewarding.

Whether you’re marketing your business, aiming to entertain your readership, or educating them on an important issue, keep the above components in mind. Doing so will help you reap significant rewards in boosting your site SEO through blogging.

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