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| "How to Write Good" |
Further help:
BEFORE YOU HIT PUBLISH by Melyssa Griffin
1. Write an effective post title with these two characteristics:
- It includes keywords or phrases.
- It is persuasive or encourages someone to click through.
Your post title is perhaps the most important part of marketing your blog post. If your title is weak — even if your content is great — then people are less likely to click through and actually read it. By creating a persuasive and descriptive title, you’ll get more people to check it out. This post by CoSchedule has great advice for writing effective headlines.
By adding keywords, you’re also optimizing your post for search engines. The title of your post is incredibly important for its “SEO,” so you want to make sure you’re including a keyword or phrase in your headlines.
Here’s an example of a “meh” post title: “Things I’ve Learned About Blogging”
Here’s a better version: “Advice for New Bloggers Who Want to Grow Their Blog.”
The second example is better because:
- It targets a specific group (new bloggers)
- It includes keywords (“advice for new bloggers” and “grow [my] blog”), which are things that someone might search for on Google in order to find your post.
2. Divide up text into smaller sections with headings.
When I see a blog with enormous blocks of text — even if it’s something I’m interested in — I usually just say, “peace out” and find something that’s more formatted for reader sanity. Try to include no more than 5-6 lines of text in your paragraphs and divide up sections with larger headlines.
Many people will scan a post, see if it sounds useful to them, and then decide if they’ll actually read the whole thing. By using big blocks of text with no headlines, you’re making it hard for people to see what your post is actually about.
3. Deep link to past posts.
Deep linking is basically just the practice of linking to past posts in a new post. So, each time you write a post which mentions a topic you’ve written about before, you can link back to that previous post. This both gives your readers more information about your topic (helpful!), but also keeps people on your site longer (awesome!).
