Five Vital Components Of Every Good Blog Post
Not every blogger writes like Hemingway, and there are a lot of poorly written blogs out there, but style aside there are some things that separate the good from the bad in the blogosphere. Knowing what makes a good blog post can have a positive impact on your traffic, regardless of how well you can actually use the English language. There are five basic components to every good blog post that every blogger should consider before they click the publish button on their dashboard.
1. Choose the keywords that best describe your content.
The search engines all use the keyword tags that are attached to a blog post to determine where to place it in their indexes. While it might be entertaining for the blogger to use amusing phrases or cryptic words to tag their posts, this just confuses the spiderbots and hurts their ranking in the SERPs where most of their new traffic will come from. Before you start writing, decide which words that you will use in your post to best sum up its content and then make sure that you write your post around them so that the content is consistent with them from the beginning to the end.
2. Create an enticingly informative title.
The headline that you use for your blog posts is the bait that you use to tempt readers to look further. This makes it really important for the title of the blog post to arouse interest in your topic by promising readers some valuable information in the content that follows. The title should also include at least one of the main keywords that are used to tag the post so that it will make more sense to the crawlers. At the same time it is vital that the title informs the reader of what you have written in your article. Cryptic titles may be fun and might even be creative, but they aren’t often informative.
3. Write content that says something.
Good articles, whether they are for print media, academic papers or internet copy, always express an opinion about the information that is being presented. Well written blog posts will always have an introduction, a body and a conclusion that is drawn from the facts that have been presented. People that read your blog posts are interested in the facts and figures that you present, but they also want to know what conclusions you have drawn from them. Your blog is your opportunity to present your point of view and the best bloggers use every post to make a clear point.
4. Include relevant images and remember to tag them for the crawlers.
Using the right image can not only help to illustrate your points, but it can also help your post to get a higher ranking in the SERPs. A good image will also help to sell your article when you put links to it on the social media sites, as they will come up as part of the posted link and make it look more interesting to potential readers. In order to get the most value from your images you have to let the crawlers know what they are about, so it is vital to remember to tag them and to include the Alt text as well as a caption and a title.
5. Ask your readers to interact with your post.
Blogging is about starting conversations with your readers, so make sure to include a call to action at the end of every post. Something as simple as asking for readers to leave their opinions can be an effective way to build engagement with your audience. In the long term it is the blogs that build relationships with their readers that are the most successful.
