Being an online advisor to a few people on making improvements to their online visibility I noticed a few things that people do that is just a BIG no, no so thought I’d share some blogging tips on how to write a blog post.

When you write a blog post the look and feel is just as important as the content of your blog.

Content is king of course and that is what’s key to having someone read your blogs.  It’s always recmmended to write things that people find interesting, helpful and useful information.  I’m not an expert in this department but what I am good at is presentation and this is where I want to focus.  You can have something interesting to say but no one reading it because it is just not that appealing to the eye.

Title

The title of the blog should be short, nothing long and try and make it catch, newspaper headline catchy. The title should relate to the content of your blog, you can’t be giving your blog the title of cats when you are writing about dogs.

Try and include your key phrase into your blog title, not always easy to do.  But try.  A key phrase is a search term someone will type in to Google or a social network to find the answer to their question.  The key phrase for this blog will be “How to write a blog post” .

Font and Style

Most blogs are set up with defualt font and size styling, generally it should be size 11pt to 14 pt max.  Arial or Verdana are good fonts to use and is seay on the eye.

Use lots of short paragraphs with lots of spacing.  Especially if your blog is long.  Looking at a blog that has very long paragraphs can be immediately off putting.

DO NOT USE CAPITAL LETTERS like I’ve just done now, it means you are shouting at someone and it is not easy for the eye to read.  If you want to highlight something rather use bold or change colour or use a heading tag.  If you do decide to use a colour try to use one colour through out, in other words use the same colour for highlighting particular words.

It’s good to italic quotations made by others, it’s just a preseantion thing, generally I would centre the quote and make it italic.

Justify the content, you don’t have to, personally it looks neater.  You will see this option in your wysiwyg toolbar. If you can’t see the justify option, on the right of your wysiwyg toolbar is an icon which looks like lots of little squares click that and a second row of options will appear. You should see the justify option text there.

Use bullet points when you can, again it makes it easier to read.

 

 External Linking

It is good to link to other blogs, articles and stories but only if it is within the context of your blog. Why would you link to a blog about cats when you are writing an article on blogging?   Highlight the text you want to link and click the link button, add in the link and also check  the box that asks “open in a new window,” if you don’t do this then when your reader click on the link it will take them to that blog and they may not find their way back to yours and you don’t want that.  I’m going to link to another site of mine to demonstrate this, and it is pointing you you what I offer to help you set up a WordPress blog.

Internal links

Internal links are just as important but don’t over do it, it’s believe to also help towards optimisation for ranking.  Use internal links if you can, this means linking to another article within your site or maybe a product on your site.  Don’t link for the sake of linking and use them sparingly and make sure it related to your content.

I will do this now and link to an online training session with me so you can see how it works. I can either leave the checkbox or check it but either way people will stay on my site.

Optimising your blog for search

To help towards trying to rank your blog  in search you need to do the following:

• Add a key phrase about your blog in the title of your blog, not always easy.
• Add your chosen  key phrase once or twice within the body of your blog, again it must be related to the content.   Try and spot if you can see the key phrase I’ve chosen within this blog.
• Use your chosen key phrase  in the title of your blog.
• Add a  sub title  and again add your chosen key phrase and highlight that sub title with a heading 1 tag.

See if you can spot my key phrase.

Images

Use images sparingly, be creative and best to only use one image or two max. If you have used an image off the web I recommend that you credit the image by adding the name of the person or site and linking to them, this is not to violate ay copyright.  Not necessary with purchased images.

When you load the image a popup displays. In the pop up  you will have a few options.  You can add the title of the image, again good for SEO.  You can add a caption, I generally like to leave this blank unless I’m crediting the owner of the picture.  But this is also more down to personal preference and style, use it.  Underneath those options you can, align left, centre or to the right, choose one of these options.

Research shows when someone lands on a website they quickly browse over the page to see if that’s what they are looking for.  So making use of all the above can help you a great deal in keeping the visitor’s attention.