Planning your blog post content is something that is done as part of your digital strategy. You write content based on your objectives and, more importantly, your target customers (or avatars). In this post I have put together some tips of how to optimise your blog posts to enhance your content efforts.

Why do you need to optimise blog posts?

There are a variety of reasons, but the main reason is – because if you don’t, you are wasting a lot of time creating content which Google never picks up on properly.

If Google (and other search engines) aren’t picking up on the content, that means people searching for you aren’t either.

How to optimise your blog posts

Here is a standard list we use which covers all the elements to take into account when drafting and uploading your blog posts to your website:

1. Choose your title and headers wisely

This means looking at your H1, H2 and H3 headers in line with the keywords, phrases or top theme you have written about.

H1 – This is the title of your blog post
Keep it tight, and try to use a keyword or phrase in your title that aligns with your topic/content.

H2 – These are the sub-headers of your blog post
These are what help to break up your content so that it’s readable for your reader, as well as Google.

H3 – These are slightly less used sub-sub-headers
You only use if you need to break up an H2 area of content.

H4 – These may be ‘designed’ headers
Generally – these more than likely won’t be used in blog post content. Your designer make use these elsewhere on your site for designed fonts / titles

2. Create a short, sensible URL (or “slug”)

Do not make the mistake of using the title of your blog post as the URL, generally this doesn’t work and makes your URL very long. Keep your slugs nice and neat and hopefully have a good keyword or phrase included (ideal).

3. Start with a tagline / short summary

It helps to grab your reader’s attention in the first few sentences to entice them to read the full blog post. Let them know what you are going to share with them. You have a better chance of ‘time of page’ increasing if you do

4. Images

It is important to keep your reader engaged, and visuals make content much easier on the eye. Be sure to include a good banner image – we put these naturally at the top of a post. Make sure when you upload the image you keep the size (mb) down to help keep your website light on its feet (load speed) and you also complete the NAME, ALT and DESCRIPTION tags for image (in line with the topic / keywords you are focussing on).

Images are indexed by Google – and therefore searchable as well. So make sure you label your images correctly and it makes sense. Longer term though – you need to make sure you upload the right size of image (mb wise) – so that your site doesn’t become ‘heavy’ and slower on loading.

5. SEO PLugin completion

We recommend YOAST as the SEO plugin for WordPress websites. It is really helpful with a traffic light system to guide you in doing the right things to help search engines crawl and index your content. It gives you tips on titles, descriptions and readability (sentence length, use of sub-headings, etc).

6. Social image sharing

If you have a sharing plugin installed and it allows you to upload images that render better across Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest – them make sure you fill in the tailored updates or tweets and upload the right size images. You have a WordPress site, you can look at a plugin like Social Pug for this.

Be consistent for the long term

Organic search authority is slow burn over the long term. Keep good practice in your day-to-day updates to your website through your blog uploads and this will help build momentum over time.

Be sure to plan your content around your target audiences (read our Customer Avatar post that explains more on this) and what you want to be found for online. You can also read our post called ‘Planning Content for Search’.

Image credit: WernerMoser from Pixabay.com

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