It seems like almost every online business these days has a blog! They are a great way to provide valuable content and information to visitors of your website! You can keep your current customer base updated, provide interesting tips & advice, or even promote products and services; the potential uses for your blog are endless.
However, what is the real purpose for blogs? Just to provide information for a visitor that happens to stumble across your site? Well, not exactly.
The answer is simply to drive more visitors to your website using quality, interesting content. A short, high-level explanation for this is that the more locally & niche relevant content you provide for your audience, the more Google will ‘like’ your site and then increase the probability of your website appearing higher in the search results. The content itself is the fun part, but it’s the structure and optimization for SEO that really matters!
Now picking the topic and providing the interesting content portion is up to you… but have no fear because we’re here to show you exactly what you need to include so that you can write effective blog posts to boost SEO!
So let’s begin!
What Every Blog Post Needs: A Checklist
A blog post’s content is very important, it’s what entices and keeps readers engaged! Besides from the content though, there are several very important items you must include in all blog posts if you want to make Google happy!
We’ve created a quick checklist to make sure you’re maximizing your blog post’s performance, we’ll describe each item briefly following this list.
A typical small 500 word blog post should include the following:
- Your Keyword Appearing 3 Times
- 2 Properly Described and Formatted Images
- 2 Outbound Links to Authority Sources
- 1 Relevant Internal Link
Your Keyword (Search Term)
What is a keyword? A keyword is basically what someone would type in to Google to find your website, product/service or blog post! You want to include your keyword in your blog post around 3 times, this helps Google in truly knowing the purpose of your blog. For example the keyword we’re targeting in this blog post is ‘How to write effective blog posts’ and this keyword has been mentioned twice already in this post!
2 Properly Described and Formatted Images
Images are great tools to help increase engagement in blog posts! You want include at least two industry relevant images within your post that follow the following specifications:
- Image is unique / copyright free
- Image file name is associated with industry (Example: ConstructionHat.jpg)
- Image title is properly described (Example: Construction Hat)
- Image alt text is properly described (Example: Hard hat for Construction)
Properly embedding and describing the images you use in your blog posts are an easy way to improve the SEO value of your content!
2 Outbound Links to Authority Sources
An outbound link is a link from your website out to another website, just like how I used it here. You’ll want to create at least two links pointing to authoritative businesses in your industry. This is a great trust signal for Google and helps show that your website is trustworthy and relevant too!
1 Relevant Internal Link
An internal link is a link from your website to another page within your website. So if you are looking for more great tips and guides on SEO make sure to check out the Imperium Knowledge base . There’s a quick example of an internal link and some great advice of checking out our Knowledge base, lot’s of great resources for businesses, agencies and entrepreneurs!
Ready to Write?
Feeling motivated to write some great performing blog posts now? Awesome. You now have the perfect checklist to begin writing effective blog posts that can drive traffic to your website and business!
You now know how to write effective blog posts in 2020! Time to get to it! (See that keyword placement there, not bad eh).
