Content is the king of SEO, and one of the most popular mediums for providing content on a regular basis to readers is by blogging. You can use this platform to provide news and updates about your products and services and to publish articles and other materials related to your niche.
As far as your visitors are concerned, a blog provides a free informational resource while for you, it also provides an opportunity to attract the attention of your visitors and hopefully convert them into customers. However, there are five key elements that constitute a great blog.
Pillar 1: Start With Captivating Content...
The most important pillar by far is the content itself. It is writing great content that is also the most time consuming and difficult part of blogging. Great content is that which is well researched and provides a unique and engaging approach to the topic that it tries to tackle.
If you are blogging for your business, then your main purpose is to turn your readers into customers. Great blog content should be original and completely free of factual, spelling or grammar errors.
Do not emphasise the importance of quantity over quality. Instead, provide content regularly while ensuring that it is fresh and gives your readers something to keep coming back for.
Three tips to great content include:
- Call To Action Headlines
- Giving the reader informative and interesting information
- Write about breaking news topics, reviews or how-to guides
Pillar 2: What Are You Doing About Links?
Links are what lead your readers to other pages on your website or even external pages. Links form the backbone of the Internet and link building has long been a core element of online marketing.
Placing links in your content can be beneficial for search engine optimization, but you should be thinking only about your readers at this point. Include links in your articles in places where they might be useful to your readers.
You should also exchange links with similar blogs and share information. This way, you can both bring each other new readers. Internal linking can also be useful as it can lead your readers to find out more about your website and business.
Three tips to linking:
- Link to related stories on your blog that readers may want to read
- Link to informative sources on external trusted sites
- Only link with anchor text that is exactly describing what is being linked to
Pillar 3: Scannable Content
To someone who puts a lot of effort into writing great content for their blog, it may not be very inspiring to learn that few people will actually read it word for word.
This is just the way that people normally browse the Internet, however. It is an inescapable fact that Internet users have a short attention span, and unless they are particularly interested by a certain subject matter, they are more likely to scan through your content to get to the precise information that they are looking for.
Create scannable content by breaking up your blog posts into multiple sub-headed sections and don't be afraid to use bold text and bulleted lists to emphasise key points.
Three tips to scannable content:
- Breaking sections down with images and bullet points to help reading easier
- Use headings and sub-headings to allow readers to jump to sections that they want to get to
- Highlight certain captivating words in bold (but don't over-do it) - good use of bold is normally used for figures and stats.
Pillar 4: Don't Forget To Get Social!
Social media has become the number one reason for the majority of people to use the Internet. Services like Facebook and Twitter are used by hundreds of millions of people every day for chatting with friends and sharing content.
As a business, you cannot afford to ignore its importance.
Integrate social media sharing features into your blog posts so that people can easily share content that they enjoyed reading, over their favourite social networking website.
Social media also allows you to interact with your readers by responding to comments and providing them with updates. Develop a community around your blog through social media.
Three tips to social media:
- Make sure your blog posts have social sharing buttons to allow people to easily share content with their friends and followers.
- Make sure you have setup your own business social media accounts so you can engage with readers, and answer any questions and comments.
- Post out content that you have written to your business social media accounts.
Pillar 5: Don't Forget SEO
Most of your first-time visitors will come from either social networking sites, or most likely, from the search engines.
While search engine optimization (SEO) is not quite what it used to be in 2013, there are still some extra steps that are very much worth taking in order to make your content more visible to the search engines.
Subtle integration of long-tail keywords into your content is one of the main elements of on-page SEO.
Other things which make your blog more visible to Google include posting links to your articles on social networking and bookmarking sites and guest blogging for others.
Ensure that search engine crawlers and people alike can easily navigate your website by avoiding excessive use of things like Flash or Java.
Three tips to SEO:
- Don't spam in keywords, you need to put the reader first.
- Make sure every article you produce has the rel="author" tag for Google Authorship.
- Use longer-tail keywords, and focus on why, how, where, who type of keywords.
Summary
Starting a blog or trying to improve a blog isn't and shouldn't be a chore to you. By following just some of these 5 steps can help you write better content and headlines, and find places that you can shout out about the masterpiece you have just written.
Remember to read your post before publishing. If you are finding it hard to read, then the likelihood is that you won't be the only one that feels that way.
When it comes to content, sharing, linking and SEO, just make sure you are putting in all your efforts. If you are proud about what you have just written and feel that it is useful content that will benefit your readers, then you will be rewarded for all that hard-work.
The post The Five Pillars of Writing Great Blog Content appeared first on Website Planet.
