8 Tips for Better Blog Posting

I find myself constantly trying to beat my clients over the head with these blogging tips, so decided to turn them into a post.

Industry people know this stuff, but it seems most website owners still do not. Every day I find these things are being overlooked when I review sites.

1) Make sure your blog posts are at least 400+ words. Low quality, shallow posts can pull down your site’s overall quality score with Google’s Panda. You can use an online tool like WordCounter.net to check or even compose them.

2) They should NOT be self promotional – don’t talk about yourself and/or your services in your blog posts. Think about how much you hate or do not desire to read or listen to other people’s pointless, self promotional filler.

3) Don’t post so frequently that it spams your followers social sites with constant updates from you. This may make them want to block you, unless your content is of very high quality, brings value to their readers, and creates engagement.

4) Make your articles educational or technical, something that helps the reader learn, improve or solve a problem of some kind. Make sure they have a specific objective and add “additional value” to what is already out there on the web. Here is a good Wikipedia explanation of Panda with a quote from Matt Cutts, head of Google’s spam team. And, be sure to link to your sources so you credit them.

5) Make sure your articles are posted to your website first and picked up by your RSS feed so Google knows you are the original author. If you don’t have an RSS feed, you need one. I use Google’s Feedburner.com, but there are many others. Then share them manually by posting a link to the article on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and so on, or share them via your own installed sharebar plugin as any other reader might. Here is an instructional video for creating an RSS feed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSTFcDi4CiU. You can also then display your feed (your latest blog posts) on your website like I do, using Google’s BuzzBoost. Instructions can be found in this article: https://vandelaydesign.com/display-your-feed-on-a-static-html-page-using-feedburners-buzzboost/

6) Make sure you are connected to people socially who would care to read your articles, and ideally share them with their own friends, family, clients, and audience, like others in your same or related industry. Without readers who will engage and share what you have written, it is basically pointless to even have social profiles.

7) Make sure your website and blog have sharing capability (a sharebar), so others can easily share your content directly to their own social sites of choice. Having linked icons to “your” social profiles is not the same thing. Someone should be able to G+1, Like, Tweet, and InShare direct from your website’s pages.

8) Make sure your blog post credits you as the author by linking to your own personal Google authorship link. This is not your company’s Google+ page, but yours. For example, this is my authorship page: https://plus.google.com/+ShelleyCates/ (not my company Google Plus page). I tell Google that I am the author of this post by using code like this in my signature link (which I will not use again since I already used it here: href=”https://plus.google.com/+ShelleyCates?rel=author“

Great Video to Watch about What Google wants for website content …

Happy Blogging!