Blog Best Practices

While it’s easy to start blogging it’s a smart idea to stay mindful of some essential blog best practises. These practises will help you in focusing on creating content tailored to your niche and target audience.

The list of best practices below isn’t exhaustive, but it should provide you with a solid grasp of how to craft content that resonates with both your audience and search engines.

Now, let’s dive into the topic of blogging best practices!

Table of Contents

Pick a Content Niche

Instead of being a generalist blogger, think about narrowing your focus. This enables you to dedicate your time and attention to a more specific range of content and a more dedicated audience.

For example, instead of creating a “Health Blog” consider blogging about:

• Women’s Health
• Men’s Health
• Diet and Nutrition
• Healthy Aging
• Weight Loss and Management
• Fitness and Exercise
• Disease Prevention
• Holistic Health

You will find it easier to create content when you have a more defined niche.

Commit to serving your niche and target audience and you will grow your blog faster than taking a generalist approach.

Read more here: The Ultimate Guide to Finding the Perfect SEO Niches for Your Business or Blog

Write for People not Search Engines

Aim your content at your target audience, the people who will benefit the most from your content. While it’s important for your content to rank well in search engines, that’s a secondary concern.

Google prioritizes authentic, relevant, and informative content that addresses searchers’ questions. The best approach to crafting such content is to focus on people rather than search engines.

Read more here: People First Content

Emphasize your Experience and Expertise

While everyone can have an opinion, insights from experts and those with firsthand experience hold greater value and provide more useful and informative content.

Google values signs of expertise and authority in content when determining rankings. Therefore, it’s crucial to draw from personal experience whenever possible. For instance, offer reviews of products or services you’ve actually used. This way, you can share both your likes and dislikes about the product.

Read more here: Make your expertise clear

Maximize Readability

If you want readers to engage with your content fully, you must take steps to ensure that it’s easily readable.

Here are some ways to improve readability:

• Use fonts large enough for readers of all ages to comfortably read the text.
• Choose a high-contrast theme to accommodate color-blind readers.
• Opt for simple words over complicated ones whenever possible.
• Keep your paragraphs concise, typically consisting of 2-3 sentences.

Read more here: Improve readability on your blog

Write Fresh, Original Content

To achieve success with your blog, it’s essential to produce fresh, original content that sets you apart from the rest. In a digital landscape filled with fierce competition, standing out is your key to success.

Consider the following techniques:

• Hot take – write about a new trending topic
• Controversial Opinion – go against the consensus view
• Unique Angle – approach a topic in a different way than normal
• In-Depth Content – write a long, detailed article that’s well researched
• Solve Problems – take a particular problem in your niche and solve it
• Long Form Content – Articles over 2,000+ words rank better (see short form vs long form)
• Consistent Posting – consistently generate new content for your readers

There are many ways you can provide fresh and original content to your readers. Google recognizes and rewards such content, granting it preferential ranking within its search engine.

Do On-Page SEO before Publishing

Before you hit that publish button, it’s crucial to ensure that your content is optimized for search engines. SEO is a broad topic, and I’ve covered it extensively before, such as in my article 29 SEO Tips and Tricks to help you rank better in Google.

Here are some straightforward content checks to perform before hitting publish:

• Main keyword in title
• Related keywords in subheadings
• Table of Contents added
• Meta description added
• Internal and external links
• Images include alternative text (alt text)
• 1000+ words per article

Read more here: Optimizing Your Content Helps Improve SEO

Monetizing your Blog

Learn different techniques you can use to make money blogging. Here is a list of the main ways to make money from your blog:

• Sell products or services online
• Affiliate Marketing
• Online courses
• Consultancy
• Ads or Sponsors

There are many other ways in addition to those listed above.

Read more here: 12 Surprising Money Making Blog Ideas You Haven’t Thought Of

Keep Learning

Never stop learning. There is always more you can learn about content creation, SEO, keyword research and blogging.

For example, AI is an important tools for website owners to boost productivity. It can help in many content creation tasks such as:

• generating new content ideas
• outlining a blog article
• proofreading content
• improving content for clarity and readability
• helping research articles

Don’t let other bloggers leapfrog you by using new tools and techniques that you haven’t learnt!

Do Technical SEO and Off-Page SEO for your blog

Your SEO ranking potential is impacted by some non-content issues. Let’s look at the most important issues that can affect the amount of organic search traffic you receive.

Mobile Friendliness

It’s important your website works, and looks good, on smartphones. This is because approximately 50% of your traffic will be smartphone devices and also because Google will use the mobile version of your website for crawling and indexing.

The Speed of your Website

Slow loading websites are annoying to users and will likely cause them to abandon your website. Try to have your website load pages in 2 seconds or less.

If you are targeting a global audience consider using a CDN to improve your loading times globally.

Use one of the various web page speed tests available online to check your website loads quickly.

Use an optimizer plugin to help boost your loading times. A good plugin that I use and is completely free is the SiteGround Optimize plugin. It works for all hosting accounts but has special features for website hosted on SiteGround.

Research Relevant Keywords for your Content Niche

It’s important to research relevant keywords before writing a new blog article. You wouldn’t want to create content on a topic that no one is searching for, right?

You don’t need to be an expert on keyword research. Start with one of the many excellent keyword research tools to find what suits you best.

In my case, I prefer using SE Ranking, a solid mid-tier SEO and Keyword Research tool. The best part? You can generate up to 5 keyword research reports per day for free. Give it a try below using the widget – simply type in a keyword phrase like “keto diet” to view a report:

Add Images to your Content

“A picture is worth a thousand words” – and often much more. Readers absorb information more quickly through images than written content.

Use images to reinforce ideas and offer visual relief from text. The sight of a large block of text can be daunting, so consider adding images every 150-300 words throughout your article.

Don’t limit yourself to images though. Add infographics, charts, and even videos into your content.

Note: Don’t forget to optimize your images to prevent website slowdown.

Add Internal and External Links

Improve navigation on your site by adding plenty of relevant internal links to other content on your site.

Additionally, consider adding external links when referencing statistics or quotes. This enables readers to explore more in-depth information on external websites.

You can’t possibly be the authority on every topic covered in your content, so don’t hesitate to include external links to high-quality sources. It’s a valuable resource for your readers.

Remove R-O-T

R-O-T stands for Redundant, Outdated and Trivial content. It’s a useful acronym to use when deciding if you need to trim or edit your content.

People have busy schedules so try to keep your content relevant and on-topic as possible.

Over time, it’s inevitable some of your content will become outdated. It’s worthwhile going over previously published content – especially content that ranks well – and updating it with your latest thoughts while removing outdated content.

Legal and Ethical Considerations

Don’t duplicate other people’s content. It’s not ethical and Google can detect plagiarism.

Don’t use AI to write the entire blog article. AI can be helpful as a tool to help you write content but the finished article should be written by you.

If you are getting paid for content or you use affiliate links add a disclaimer to your page so readers know.

Read more here: How to find Duplicate Content on your website

Final Thoughts

I hope you found this article useful. Here is a quick summary:

• Pick a content niche (don’t be a generalist)
• Write for people not search engines
• Maximize readability
• Write fresh, original content
• Do on-page SEO before publishing
• Learn how to monetize your blog
• Keep learning – your competitors will be
• Remove R-O-T (redundant, outdated and trivial content)

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