11 Ways to Write Compelling Blog Posts
In this and the previous post, we have outlined some useful tips for maximizing your blog’s potential for your visitors and for the search engines.
PART 2 - The Nuts and Bolts
1. Use great categories
When you write a post, place it in 1 to 3 different categories related to the post. For example, an article on the movie, Papillon, could go under “Papillon” and “Steve McQueen”. Avoid the temptation to add it to 10 different categories though, such as including “jail,” “devils island,” and “France” because that is just overkill. But if you wrote something great on Papillon, you have made it easy for your reader to find all your posts on Papillon because they simply have to click on the category link at the top or bottom of the entry.
2. Pay attention to how you write
One of my favorite bloggers has the unfortunate habit of writing detailed long entries… without a single paragraph break and with the double-whammy of also writing with a font size smaller than usual. If I look up for a moment, it is hard to find my place again in his 1000-word entries. As a result, I don’t read it as often as I would like to, simply because reading it is such a painful experience.
3. Post when you can
The more frequently you post, the more likely Googlebot and other “spider” bots will stop by on a more regular basis. In fact, Google will likely index AND POST your blog post almost immediately if you have the blog set to ping correctly!
If you only post once in a blue moon—which is okay—expect that it might take a while for Google to stop by and see that you actually have updated again. Google loves updated fresh sites, so it make sense to feed the bot what it wants.
4. Create unique stories
Bloggers love to link to other bloggers. When you write original blog entries, rather than just rehashing something someone else has already said, you increase the odds that someone will find yours interesting enough to link to and talk about. And a reader of that blogger’s blog might read the entry and decide to write something about what you said as well, meaning yet another link as well. And if you are fortunate, it will go viral, meaning suddenly it seems like every blogger in your market space is talking about what you wrote. Rinse and repeat as often as possible for maximum exposure and link juice.
5. Use keywords in your subject line
Make them compelling or leave readers with a cliffhanger to encourage them to click and read the full entry. Remember that the subject appears in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) as the link and in your RSS feed. Then use ‘SEO Title Tag’ plugin for WordPress to assign unique title tags to individual posts.
6. Be aware of your anchor text
When you link to someone’s blog entry, or even a previous blog entry on your own site, make sure you link well. This means instead of linking to someone’s blog entry with the anchor text “click here”, you link to them using anchor text related to the blog entry, such as “Dave scores the winning goal in championship”.
7. Buzzlogic
Use Buzzlogic to find out which bloggers are most influential in conversations—refer to them and try to get them to link to you. You can only ask, right?
8. Blog Rolls
Get into other bloggers’ blog rolls (trackbacks and comments won’t help in link gain).
9. Be Sticky
Use “sticky” posts that always appear at the top of the page as a way to add a keywords-rich introduction to category pages. “Adhesive” plugin works for this.
10. Spread the link love
If you are blogging about a story, link up the original story as well as other’s commentary on the same topic. When you do so, you will often make those bloggers aware of your blog’s existence (if they weren’t already) when people click from your blog to theirs. And it also increases the odds that they will either link to you on that story or on something you blog about in the future.
11. More, more, more
Add the “more” feature in WordPress to allow people to see the first paragraph then “Read more” to see the whole article. Having one page for each post is a good idea.
