How to Create A Perfect SEO Optimized Blog in No More Than 2 Steps - TreDigital
- Updated on: 2017-04-24
- Read original article here
You are close to launching your startup and sharing your product with the public. One of the most important things you want to do is to drive traffic to your site.
Blogs are a great way to start educating them about your product. However, just writing a blog is not enough. You must learn to create SEO Optimized Blog.
Now you may be wondering “What does SEO Optimized Blog mean?”.
Did you know that “77% of Internet users read blogs, 6.7 million people blog on blogging sites, and 12 million people blog via social networks.” This means that you can not afford not to create compelling content.
Your first instinct would be to head to Google and search: “How to write an SEO Optimized blog”. You will be greeted to a plethora of results ranging from How to Write a Blog Post: A Simple Formula to Follow to The 12 Dos and Don’ts of Writing A Blog.
After reading all the articles you can on writing blogs you should now be ready to tackle running a blog. The goal of this post is to help you formulate an checklist for your blog posts so you can keep a consistent feel to your posts and finish them in a timely manner.
We will go into creating a checklist that can be used to help run your blog in an efficient manner. A checklist will help you organize your blog which will make your life easy keeping the blog running.
[Tweet “The key to a successful blog is having great content.”]
Blogs with new and exciting content will drive plenty of traffic and interest in your startup.
We will give you our outline to creating the perfect blog. This will give you a good idea on how you can start building your outline for your startups blog.
Keeping your blog active is achieved by creating new posts frequently. You can figure out how many posts should make a week. Setting up a certain amount of posts a week will help you get into a rhythm of creating new posts.
When you blog on a schedule you will have an easier time writing new posts and keeping your blog frequently updated.
There are many downsides to not keeping your blog frequently updated. A blog that is not frequently updated will lose readers and attention. Keeping your posts frequent and on a schedule will keep your readers coming back for more.
“Sometimes bloggers find it difficult to update their blog post frequently, it might be because they are doing blogging part time or busy with some other work. Whatever may be the reason, if bloggers fails to update their blogs frequently then blog might lose regular visitors and organic traffic also. Bloggers just need to follow few tips to keep their blog updated with frequent posts.”
You can Google “blogging schedules” and you will run into many posts are articles on how to set up a blogging schedule. Many of the posts you find will give you best practices and checklists to follow to set up your schedule.
Before you create your blog your should brainstorm what your blog should focus on. Your primary goal of your blog should be to promote your startup and products, but focusing on certain aspects is a good idea.
For example one month you can focus your posts on showing how your product can help your customers, and the next month you can focus on how you developed your product.
You should keep in mind that not all of your readers will be engineers. To keep your blog content available to a wider audience, explaining your startup and products in plain English versus engineer jargon will insure that more readers will be able to understand you and your products.
Another way to increase readability of your blog is to keep your posts to constrained to a minimum amount of words. For example we try and keep our blog posts here to a minimum of 1800 words.
The longer your posts are the less readers will actually read the entire post. Longer posts will make more of your readers only skim your posts, while shorter posts will tend to be read in their entirety.
Knowing how to format your posts is another great way to keep your blog easy to read. Keeping your headers and subheaders the same size and font will keep posts more presentable. Another formatting option is to keep your paragraphs to three sentences.
Keeping your blog easy to read will hold the attention of your readers. Copy Blogger shows us that “79% of web users scan rather than read”. Creating scannable content will allow readers to scan your posts and still get the most of out them.
“To write successfully for the web, you need to forget some of what you learned in English composition class.”
Accept that people scan web pages rather than reading them in detail, and work with this reality rather than fighting it.
If you want to cover a complex topic, consider breaking it into a series of posts. It’s a great way to keep people coming back for more, and your reader will find it easier to digest your content if they get it in portion-controlled sizes.”
Researching everything you put into your blog should be mandatory. Nothing will discredit your blog more than publishing a post that has content that has had no research behind it.
All research that goes into your posts should be credited as well. Linking to other posts or case studies you used for research should always be done. Citing your sources is important and gives your post credibility.
You can find many blog posts and articles that will give you many great tips on how to do research for your blog. “How We Research: A Look Inside the Buffer Blog Process” is a good article that gives many suggestions on how you can research for your blog.
“The other way I collect research material is to simply read a lot. I follow authors and blogs I like reading on Twitter–you might prefer to use RSS, Facebook or Google+ for this. Whenever I come across something that seems interesting, I save it to my read later list. ”
Google is always your friend when researching. Searching a few simple keywords related to what you are researching will always give you good results.
Visuals are an important part of keeping your blog interesting.
Pictures can go a long way to making your blog visually appealing. Using pictures is also an effective way of proving a point or example in your post. You should try and only have two to three pictures in each post.
You should also try and include videos into your posts. Videos are a great way to show off your product and startup. Try and not to include more than one or two videos.
Being a startup, using videos and pictures created by your company are some of the best ways to show off your product and company. If you have the assets to create your own video and pictures you should attempt to do this as much as possible for posts where they would be relevant.
Getty images is a great way to get stock photos for your blog. They have included an embed feature for blogs that allows you to use their images for free and give credit to them with a simple link.
A little research on Google, you can find many posts and articles outlining ways you can make your blog more visually appealing.
[Tweet “One of the most important aspects of a blog is its look and feel.”]
“One of the most important aspects of a blog is its look and feel, and this is something that’s incredibly easy to fix once you know it’s a problem. A poorly designed or chaotic blog makes the blogger appear amateurish. The reader thinks, “if she doesn’t have time to make it look nice, how does she have time to produce quality content that I’d want to read? Hmm… perhaps I better browse on.”
Sharing your blog is one of the most important thing you can do to drive traffic to your blog. Social networks, forums, and other blogs are all great ways to get the word out about your blog. Word of mouth is your friend
You should include sharing options on your blog so readers can tweet, post to facebook, and email to their friends. Posting your blog to forums and website like Reddit or StumbleUpon will also increase traffic to your site.
A few simple Google searches you can find all of the most popular social sites. Taking advantage of all the popular sites will be your best way to insure you can share your posts to a wide audience.
“Luckily, there’s no shortage of ways to spread the word. Blogs, social networks, instant messenger, and mobile phones are some of the many ways to let others know about the best content on the web. Here are our 20 favorite ways to share a great blog post:”
Setting up a newsletter or email list is another necessary thing to do to increase your traffic. An email list that your readers can sign up will insure they stay up to date with all your posts.
If you mention others in your posts or link to other blogs or articles you should take the time to email the authors of the blogs or articles linked. Many other bloggers and writers will be interested in seeing their work referenced and they may also share your blog as well.
Encouraging readers to comment on your post will help you engage your readers and it will make them feel like they are valued readers.
Getting started on a blog is always a difficult task. There are many factors and go into creating a perfect blog.
We hope you have taken away from this post that Content and Sharing are key to having a successful and popular blog. Running a successful blog for your startup is a great way to get many people interested and reading about your product. The more people interested in your startup potentially means more customers.
Keeping your blog frequently updated with great content will help your blogging skills grow. The more your skills grow the better your blog will be. A good blog will reflect well on your startup.
Now you should feel confident in creating your blog. You can take our suggestions and adapt them to fit your startup and blog. Create your own outline that fits your startup and you are ready to amaze the world with your blog!
Feel free to leave a comment with your questions, feedback, or experiences with running a blog.
