Blogging Best Practices: A Cheat Sheet
So, you have a blog. Whether you call it ‘News & Events,’ ‘Insights and Trends,’ or ‘Posts,’ that section on your site has the functionality of a blog. Having a blog on your website gives you the opportunity to create additional content for search engines to index, which is now basically a requirement for domain authority and SERP ranking boosts. However, your blog won’t be very helpful to your search engine rankings if it’s not optimized and following blogging best practices.
It’s important to note that, despite evidence to the contrary, including a ‘blog’ on your website does not necessarily require you or anyone on your team to become a ‘blogger.’ Instead, it may be more helpful to think of the blog as a space where newsworthy items, event details, or other quick website content updates should live.
Each blog post you create becomes its own separate page on your website, complete with a unique URL that you can link to and from. The content that you post on the blog will be indexed by search engines. Search engines suggest that you write for the user and the rankings will follow. We suggest keeping in mind the following blogging best practices guidelines:
- Blog post titles should be around 60 characters in length and can (and should) be optimized for search engines.
- Each blog post can (and should) include targeted keywords, a meta description, and an H1 header, all of which can (and should) be optimized for search engines.
- You should write at least 150 words of content into the blog post. Even if you’re just sharing a picture or link to an article, summary text is critical for the user experience and for search engines to pick up the page. Think of it as a place to tell people why you’re sharing the link or photo and how it is relevant to your organization.
- The content included in the blog should be unique, just like any other page on your site.
- Optimize beyond just your blogs copy, optimizing images is important too.
- Make sure to include internal and external links in your copy, but only to relevant supporting content.
Blogs are fairly simple to maintain, all things considered. If you’re not willing to or interested in building a large-scale content strategy for your website, it is still a good idea to maintain the blog by posting a couple of times per month. If you have a regular social media post schedule, use the blog as an extra place to post whatever you might be sharing. That way, you’re adding to your website’s unique domain authority while continuing to build a multi-faceted digital reputation.
As always, if you have any questions about our suggestions or would like some specific tips and tricks for your unique situation, please do not hesitate to reach out.