Blogging is not merely about writing good content and publishing it. Any content writing agency will solely agree upon the fact that there’s quite a lot that goes into blogging and as a blogger, you will be forced to wear a bunch of hats! So, you may be the only person creating, editing and publishing your blog post. Now, before you publish your post, there are several factors you need to consider to make your blog more clickable! So, it’s not just about the content in your blog posts that will get you more clicks but also the way you publish it. With so much on your plate, you need to plan a checklist of things to avoid errors before you consider publishing the post!
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Rethink Your Headline
The perfect headline has the power to promote your post on social media. The audience will be attracted to your headline first which will encourage them to read the article further. Having an impactful headline can give a great kick-start to your post for further reading.
Headlines with a question makes the audience curious to find out more about the topic. Having numbers in your headline may create curiosity among the audience to read the blog. For example, “X books you must read”. Remember that your headlines need to be eye-catchy and using exclamations, numbers, or even an idiom or a popular phrase can help you do so.
Proof Read the Post
Proofreading is not an option, it’s a MUST! Check for errors made while typing. Sometimes having grammatical errors and irrational sentences can show disregard to the readers. To avoid such mistakes from featuring in your blog post, here’s what you need to do when you proofread your article.
Check Formatting
People like to skim through online content. You need some eye-catching sub-section headlines and images to break up the content and maintain the reader’s attention. Divide the content into paragraphs to make reading easier as well as informative for the audience. Also, make sure the sub-sections created in the body of your post have a consistent gerund and flow making it easier to read quickly.
Add structure
A blog post is not a novel. You have one chance of grabbing and keeping people’s attention towards your post. A blog post without structure is difficult to read. Having good sentence connectivity and flow of thought is important in engaging readers. Also, add suitable images that are related to each section in your article. Lastly, make sure you are consistent in providing the information. For instance, if you are using UK English for your posts, then stick to the same for all your blogs. Likewise, if you are using numericals instead of text, maintain the same throughout your blog.
Add SEO-friendly URLs
When your URLs are SEO friendly, you can reap better results.
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Any content writing agency will agree that only using keywords phrase is not enough to create an SEO-friendly content for your blog. Cleaning your URL enables to be more clickable for the reader. Here’s an example to explain my point further. Let’s say you are blogging about genres of music and your keywords are, unfamiliar music genres to Indians. Which post do you think will do better?
- /2018/09/25/Unfamiliar-music-genres-to-Indians-123456
- /unfamiliar-music-genres-to-Indians
It’s obvious the correct answer to this question is the second option. A search engine friendly URL is not too long, but it can include the keyword you want to rank for. Often the title of your blog could be a choice for your URL leaving out all the stop words.
Add ALT Text to Multimedia Content
Make sure you add ALT text for all images, infographics, videos, GIFs, etc. ALT text is important for search engines to read the image. You can even consider using keywords in your ALT text to boost your SEO efforts.
ALT text or alternate text is an attribute added to an image tag in HTML. This text appears inside the image container when the image can’t be displayed. It helps search engines to understand what an image is about. Here, take a look at this example of a code:
<img src=”/img/example.gif” alt=”Things to consider before publishing your blog post.”>
Blogging increases web traffic or your business webpage. Your blog post can only be a productive one if these effective steps are considered and ticked off before you actually hit the publish button!