5 Things That Will Hurt Your Blog Post
Margaret Levine, January 23, 2014
In today's world, anyone can be considered a blogger. If you write for a blog, you can call yourself a blogger, regardless of how good or bad the content is. However, not everyone can create a successful blog post. SEO copywriting is the art of creating great, readable, creative, and unique content that is also technically optimized to rank well in search engine results.
Below are five things that will hurt your blog post.
1. Creating confusing headlines
It's important to consider that this headline won't just appear at the top of your post on the blog, but also in search engine results, feed readers, and subject lines. The purpose of creating a headline is to draw readers into your post. If you create a confusing headline that might be a little bit too clever for its own good, readers won't necessarily know what it's supposed to be about and their eyes might glide right past it. Write headlines that are unique, specific, useful, or urgent.
2. Not linking to old posts
By linking to old posts in your blog, you can help not only prove your point, but drive traffic to older posts. Links are a great way to get Google spiders crawling through your site and get you ranking for keywords.
3. Not filling out a title and meta description
In a previous post titled "Optimizing Your Wordpress Content 101" (see what I did there?), I talked about optimizing your blog posts on Wordpress using Wordpress SEO by Yoast. By filling out the fields, the plugin takes care of any technical optimization that may otherwise be beyond your capabilities and helps you write better content by forcing you to choose a keyword to focus on.
4. Not publishing often enough
It's important to publish as least one blog post per month. The less you post, the less chance your most recent post has at being successful; the more your post, the more traffic you can expect.
5. Writing in an unappealing format
The worst thing you can do is create a big chunk of copy as a blog post… and expect users to read it. When writing a blog post, you must consider readability. Think bullet points, lists, short paragraphs, subheadings, white space, pictures, etc., to make your blog post easier to read.
At the end of your blog post, remember to invite users to engage in conversation in the comments section and use social media to your advantage.
Other things that can hurt your blog post include: neglecting to link to other blogs or websites, creating "chunky" URLs, and ignoring readers. A good blog offers content that kills it… rather than blog posts that get killed. Avoid the five things above that will kill your blog post every time.
