A blog post is an effective way of keeping the audience engaged about your products or services. The question is how to write a compelling blog post.
Many factors play an essential role in writing a high-quality blog post. Since blogging started in the early 90s, there have been many changes in how search engines behave, which dictates the whole blogging process. This post will look at the different factors combined to produce a good blog post.
What Is A Good Blog Post?
A good blog post is always easy to read and understand for an average reader. It also comes with a good headline and a hook. Short, clear, and linked sentences also play an essential role. Providing subheadings for important points creates interest for readers. Aside from these readability elements, SEO also assists in ranking the post. On-Page SEO tackles aspects on the web page such as Title, Headings, Outbound, Inbound Links, and Images. Off-Page SEO handles Link Building, Social Media Marketing, and Customer Reviews. For international SEO, technical SEO takes care of Speed, Crawalbility, Security, Sitemap, and Hreflang. Read more in detail about Best Skills For SEO.
Readability in Blog Post
Reading Score
The reading score tells how easy your text is to read. It is crucial to consider readability while writing a blog post. Your audience will immediately leave if the blog post is difficult to read. It would cause the bounce rate to rise and ultimately lower the rankings of your blog/website. The score can be manipulated by increasing or decreasing the number of characters and words. A simple blog post doesn’t challenge one’s writing ability. Instead, it helps make your point clear in an effective manner.
Less Passive Voice
You should use a less passive voice in your blog post because it makes the text less clear and lengthy. On the other hand, the active voice is pretty much straightforward and conveys the message very clearly. Almost all passive voice sentences have active voice substitutes. However, if you can’t find an active voice sentence using passive voice is quite acceptable.
Don’t Start Sentences With The Same Word
Witting multiple sentences with the same word make it unpleasant to read. It disturbs the reading flow of the reader. A paragraph that contains sentences that start with the same word doesn’t provide a good reading experience. So, beginning a sentence with repetitive words is generally a bad idea. It makes the readers lose interest in reading. Try to use a synonym of the desired word. You may also try rearranging the words to make them more readable.
Subheadings in Blog Post
Subheadings are used to guide readers through blog posts. They point out what the following text is about. Examining the text without subheadings makes it difficult for the readers. It becomes even worse if the sentence after the main heading is long. A good subheading grabs the intention of the reader and enlightens them. Headings indirectly influence SEO because search engines record the bounce rate. If it is low due to the excellent structure of your blog post, then you will ultimately get a high ranking. Using keyphrase in headings/subheadings is very useful.
Paragraphs
A well-written paragraph is vital in making the text easy to read. Big paragraphs without headings/subheadings scare the readers. People hardly read a paragraph from start to end. They scan it first to know what they will get to read. A good paragraph provides crisp information about its topic. A good paragraph length is 150 words. If the paragraph length exceeds its word count, try to break it down with headings/subheadings. This way, you can keep the paragraph organized and clean.
Sentence Length For Better Blog Post
Shorter sentences are easy to read than longer sentences. A short sentence delivers the message quickly. Writing short sentences is tricky, but it gives outstanding results once mastered. A good sentence is readable on its own. Use active voice more than passive voice. Active voice sentence uses fewer words to describe the same message as passive voice. The word count for a well-balanced and clear sentence is 20 words or less. You can break long sentences and connect them using transition words. Read more about how to write short sentences.
SEO For Blog Posts
Importance of Focus Keyword in Slug
The slug starts after the backslash of the URL. Including focus keywords in the slug influences the SEO of your blog post/website. A slug should be user-friendly because that’s what people see in search results. A properly constructed slug tells the reader and search engines about the blog post’s subject. Slug is not reusable, so choose it wisely. Avoid using dates in the slug because it chokes the URL. A good slug contains lowercase words and is between 3 and 5 words in length.
Use of Focus Keyword in Title
The focus keyword in the title immediately clears the content of your blog post. This practice aims to make your audience click on it and increase the click-through rate of your blog/website. The keyword in the page title affects the blog/website ranking because Google doesn’t have a limit on characters used in SEO titles. The limit is on visibility. It is worth investing time in writing a good SEO title with a focus keyword.
Focus Keyword in Introduction
Writing a good introduction is very critical for the good ranking of a blog post. Overusing the focus keyword will make the text repetitive. Including focus keywords at the beginning of sentences is crucial to grab the reader’s attention. This will make the reader stay on your post because most readers don’t read it. Instead, they scan it. It also helps search engines to learn about your blog post.
Meta Description With Focus Keyword
A meta description is used to provide the sketch of your blog post. Just like the focus keyword in the title, the meta description is used to increase the click-through rate. A good meta description is between 120 and 150 words depending on your message. It uses active voice for precise message delivery with click-to-action. Meta description persuades the reader that your post has everything they want. Read more about it here.
Length of Focus Keyword For Better Blog Post
Using a sharp focus keyword helps in SEO because they get a lot of searches. However, short keywords have more competition. You can also choose to use long keywords, also known as long-tail keywords. Long keywords have less competition, but they make it hard for posts to optimize for SEO. To determine if your post will rank for a keyword of your choice, you need to know how many words you have used and how many they should have. The best word count for focus keywords is between 4 and 6. Read more about the length of the focus keyword.
The Density of Focus Keyword
The keyword density means how many keywords appear in the blog post, and it depends on the length of the text. Google looks for those web pages that best match the search query. However, use the focus keyword more than needed. Excessive use of focus keywords is a sign of keyword stuffing for Google. Visitors to your post may get annoyed, and it should be avoided at all times. As an alternative, you can use synonyms of your focus keyword.
Images For Blog Post
Using featured images and other images related to the blog post’s topic is essential for SEO. When you use high-quality images with alt text, it helps the audience in their image search. Using images properly delivers the message clearly and helps increase subscribers and generate leads. However, the question is where to get them. A graphic designer can design images for you, or you can use royalty-free images. Because articles with images get 90% more views than those without images.
So what is the fair number of images for a blog post? If you write a long text, then aside from a featured image, an image after 150 to 350 words is a good ratio depending on the length of text.
Outbound Links For Blog Posts
An outbound link points to another blog post/website from yours. Linking reliable and educative websites within your niche to your blog post improves the credibility of your blog post/website. There are two kinds of outbound links. Follow and Nofollow, Follow links allow search engines to follow them, while Nofollow links don’t let this. Outbound links help search engines link points to create a web that stretches from one website to another and so on. Linking to high-quality websites will contribute to the reliability of your content. Because it exhibits to the search engines that you are using the correct information to generate text for your blog post.
Internal Links For Blog Posts
An internal link links a webpage/blog post to another webpage/blog post within the same domain. Users use these links to navigate the website, and search engines use them to discover new content. Correct internal links lead your visitors and Google to the most relevant blog posts/webpages, which helps to gain a high ranking. Learn more about internal links.
The Text Length of A Good Blog Post
A blog post’s text length is important for SEO and ranking. Longer the text better the result. The long text gives Google ideas about the content of the blog post. Because longer text would contain more keyword density. Even if you can write long text, it should be high quality. High-quality long text is difficult, but you must aim for well-organized authentic content. It means the text should be your own words. To get high rankings for your blog post, you must target 1000 or more words.
Conclusion
This article discussed the basic skills needed for writing a good blog post, from readability to SEO and their subtopics. If you follow the rules described in this article, your audience and Google will know your website better. Avoid long sentences, and keep the word count of a sentence 20 or below. Aim for 120 or below words per paragraph. Use headings/subheadings and alt text for images with focus keyword(s). Don’t forget to use focus keywords in the SEO title, introduction, and meta description. Because this is the introduction of your blog post in Google search snippet. These methods are just an outline; there’s much more to be discussed. If you think this post was helpful, please leave feedback.