The list below is a good start on creating articles that display well, draw your audience in and help you rank better on Google. Now these 10 best practices are not set in stone and you don’t need to do them all, it is a guide to help you get decent articles and stay reasonably consistent.
As much as you may want to create the title of your article and take it from there, my suggestion would be to rather start with a topic, write the article then find a title that works.
- Pick a topic that is in line with your overall marketing plan and objectives, to simply write for the sake of writing can at times be rambling.
- Create a rough structure, a sort of road map with the objective in mind, stick to the simple: intro, body conclusion and if relevant the close or call to action (buy a product, book a ticket, subscribe, send and email or share the article)
- Make sure you stick to a single perspective, any will do but make sure you stick to it.
- Create the article in word first. There are few reasons:
- You can keep count of the words – you want to aim for 500 or more, anything less is more of a social media post
- You can run spell check and you need to do this, people tend not call you out on it as it is common place these days, that said, people notice.
- You can save the document, send it to colleagues and others to review before you post it live to the world.
- Don’t you SMS / Whatsapp / slang text, this is an article that is representative of your brand / person or orginisation.
- The layout is critical, unless you are creating a list (like I am here) you wan to keep your paragraphs to 3 or 4 sentences at the most. It makes for easier reading (especially on mobile)
- Now that your article is ready you can pick a title, here is a gem of a tool: https://coschedule.com/headline-analyzer# anything above 70 is a decent title
- Include a featured image, is 1024 x 800 pixels. And ensure the image is no bigger than 500kb. (all websites that we build have image optimiser built in and will compress this even more) Here are some website that will help you resize images
- Label your images with name that are key word rich and as descriptive as possible as search engines index image names. Add the alt description
- Share the blog as soon as you load it on social media (if you are not going to share it…who will)
So, although this list is not complete with every single option available, I hope it is a start and gets you going. If you need any help give me a shout on brian@insideman.co.za