How to Write an Exceptional Blog Post

Blogs and Organic Search

Want to get your company or product on the first page of Google results without paying to be there? A great way to get on the front page without breaking the bank is creating an original content generation initiative. In far fewer words - a blog. When properly written, a blog can get you on the front page of results for free. To get the full explanation, you can read a previous blog post we put together on the topic here. Today, we'll focus on how to write a blog to make sure it's gets as high up the rankings as possible. 

 (Quality) Content is King

There is an often repeated saying in the digital marketing world - "Content is king." I would tweak it to say quality content is king. Content -  in this instance, any digital copy on your site, mass emails social media outlets that can be easily deceminated  - is the most effective means of differentiating your marketing from other brands. Blogs can play a huge role in this effort. However, simply cobbling together a blog post, or resharing third party content does a poor job of building interest in your company. You need original, unique content that carries the value proposition of your brand. So before tearing into the SEO section of this post, keep in mind that you can hit all of these SEO pointers, but if your content is junk, you won't rank very high on any search engine. 

Blog SEO Best Practices

Remember how we mentioned that the content needs to be of quality? By that, we mean that your intended audience needs to find it useful. A great way to see if your blog posts are useful is to view the bounce rate on your blog pages. If people read the first paragraph and leave, you'll have a high bounce rate. The higher the bounce rate, the lower your blogs will rank. So, again, your content needs to be useful, not just present. 

Another best practice is to have your main topic in the title of your blog. For instance, if you want to write a blog post about the best place to eat cherry pie in Traverse City, Michigan, a good title would be "Where to Eat Cherry Pie in Traverse City." Ideally, your blog title should mirror quite closely what your intended audience is going to enter into a search engine, like Google. Keep in mind, most search engines only index up to 70 characters of your blog title. Try to keep the title between 40-70 characters to make sure your blog is adequately described, without going over the limit. 

Next - enter a meta description! This is the copy that will appear under your blog page in the search engine results. Essentially, this is a great place to concisely put the focus of your blog post for viewers to read before visting your site. These words help search engines know what your blog post is about, so they deliver the most relevant results to people searching similar topics to that of your post. This also helps viewers to know what your post is about before they visit your site - that way, your bounce rate isn't skewed by people who go to your site expecting a blog on one topic, not getting what they wanted, and leaving your page quickly. You only have 160 characters for this description, so use works that are most relevant to your post. Your blog post itself should have over 300 words to be considered useful to most search engines, so be sure to meet that minimum requirement for best results. 

If you use headings in your blog, you'll want to use header tags to highlight these headings and tell the search engine what the paragraph or section is about. Using this blog post as an example, you would go to the text view in your CMS and use < h1 > Blogs and Organic Search < /h2 > for the first heading, and use H2, h3 for each subsequent heading. Be sure to close the header tag by including in each heading, or your post will throw search engines for a loop! (In your tags, you won't have spaces between the carrots and header tags, or between the tags and the title.)

It may be tempting to load your post and meta descriptions with intended keywords, which are simply words that tell search engines what your page is about. If you owned a bike shop, for example, you could write a blog that's 500 words long, and make 200 of the words be "bike rentals" so your shop ranks higher on results. Search engines caught onto this a long time ago, and will penalize your page accordingly. Your bounce rate will also be quite high, as the content is surely to be of low quality, and avergae page session times are sure to be very short.

Don't Forget Your ALT Tags! 

The ALT tag for your images can be a determining factor in your rankings. This is an SEO tactic that a lot of companies skip or are lax about - and you can make that work to your advantage. Without going too far into detail, an ALT tag is the label for your image. These labels are what tell the search engine what the image on your page is depicting, as the search engine can't see the image. It's a computer - you have to tell it what you're showing your audience. An example of this is when you upload a picture to your blog, you should label the image accordingly. In our hypothetical bike shop scenario, a picture of rental bikes on the blog post could be titled "rental bikes traverse city" - this would tell the search engine what's in the picture on your post.This will help your post, and image, rank higher in results There are a myriad of different uses for ALT tags, so the above is just one example. Penn State has an excellent resource on ALT tags that really helps me with tags, so be sure to check it out. 

 

There is still plenty more to learn about using content generation as a marketing tool. If you'd like to find out more, drop us a line at info@swelldevelopment.com, or reach out to us on Facebook or Twitter.