If you’re like most marketers, you want to be known for great blogs.
While everyone likes the feeling of success, it goes much deeper than that in the world of content marketing.
In addition to the fact that great blogs make you look good, they also offer multiple benefits for your company, ranging from improved Google rankings to a higher level of authority in your niche.
With this in mind, it’s clear that great blogs are worth the time and effort it takes to create them, and that people who focus on honing their blogging skills and improving their content at every turn will benefit from increased relevance and authority.
So, what can you do to finish the year out strong and go into your New Year ahead, writing thebest blogs you’ve ever created?
Read on to learn more.
Why Good Blogging Matters
Good blogging is so, so critical. While many marketers believe they can just sit down, tap away at the keyboard for 20 minutes, hit “publish,” and be done with it, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Good blogging takes time, effort, and attention, and it’s a skill that few people possess. This, in large part, is why it matters so much. If everyone who wrote content online were a great blogger, it would be impossible to stand out from the crowd, and virtually everyone would give up.
Since the majority of online content is bad, however, good blogging stands out like a glowing gem, and readers are inherently attracted to it. Over time, this means that the most discerning, most qualified readers on the Web gravitate toward quality content, while everyone else stays in the realm of “ho hum” content.
By mastering the art of blogging, and ensuring the blogs you write are as good as they can be, you can attract these highly qualified readers to your site, boosting your bottom line and sales numbers all the while.
5 Sure-Fire Tips to Write Your Best Blogs of the Year
Now that you understand why good blogging is so essential, let’s talk about how to do it. To write your best blogs of the year, starting now, follow these five tried-and-true tips:
1. Use great SEO as the foundation of your blogs
Today, great content is two parts creativity and one part SEO. For your content to shine, it needs to be built on the pillars of great SEO. In addition to helping ensure content is discovered online, great SEO also goes a long way toward helping Google rank your content and display it more prominently to readers.
To ensure your content is abiding by SEO best practices, follow these tips:
- Include the right keywords. Keywords still play a significant role in on-page SEO, and they can help focus and direct your content. For best results, conduct quality keyword research and then integrate target keywords naturally throughout your content. As a general rule, they should be included in your page’s headline, several of its subheaders, the body content, and the meta content. While search engines don’t pay as much attention to keywords today as they used to, it’s still wise to keep your saturation under three percent to avoid Google penalties.
- Add images and alt. text to your post. Images can beef up your SEO in a big way, so don’t publish your content without adding pictures and relevant alt. text.
- Keep your sentences and paragraphs short. Readable content is optimized content. With this in mind, break your content into readable chunks and ensure your sentences aren’t too long or complicated.
2. Take your headlines to the next level
This tip is true at any time of any year: great headlines make all the difference. With this in mind, make this the time that you dedicate yourself to crafting clickable titles for your blogs. Don’t phone it in and add a title just to have something there. Instead, do some research, pull in power words, take notes from highly clickable sites like Upworthy, and find a formula that works well for your audience.
3. Focus on providing answers
Too many crappy blogs out there read like one-sided dialogues that don’t consider the reader at all, let alone seek to solve his or her problems. To create the best content of the year, though, we need to turn that on its head. As a general rule, all of your content should focus on providing answers to your audiences’ most pressing questions. If it doesn’t, it’s falling short of the mark.
Why is this important, you ask? Think about how people search in Google right now. Queries like “How do I cook an egg?” or “How many keywords is too many?” are incredibly common, and content that answers these questions is positioned to stand out as some of the most relevant and useful on the Web.
4. Keep accuracy in mind at all times
Even if you’re publishing authoritative, well-written content, it’s worth nothing if it’s not accurate. In light of this, it’s essential to fact-check yourself as you write. Find reputable sources (preferably those with a DA score of 50 or greater) to link to and ensure that any facts or statistics you’re using are up-to-date.
5. Use visual content to add interest
In a world where more than 56 million blogs are published monthly on WordPress alone, finding ways to stand out is essential. Luckily, visual content can help. Beef up your blog posts with infographics, screenshots, custom visuals and beautiful blog headers. In addition to grabbing your audiences’ interest, these things will also help improve your engagement and SEO.
The Best Content of the Year Starts Right Now
There we have it. Now you possess the tools to create the best content of the year, and there’s nothing standing between you and blogging success. By implementing these five tips, it’s easy to make your blogs more engaging and exciting to your readers, while becoming a better writer in the process.
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by Julia McCoy
source: SiteProNews