Here’s a list of guidelines that will help make your blog successful.
- Gear the site towards the readers
- Know your target search keywords
- Choose your categories wisely
- Blog regularly, and as often as you can handle
- Take advantage of your images
- Use descriptive link text
Gear the site towards the readers
People on the web are often in a hurry. They are task-oriented and interested in learning as much as possible, as fast as possible. This causes them to quickly skim.
- Grammar check everything.
- Try to write at an 8th grade reading level.
- Separate paragraphs with about 10 pixels (or one line) of text. Try not to let paragraphs get to more than 4 lines of text.
- Replace all caps with title case (or just sentence case) where possible. It’s kind of a pain to learn the grammar of title case, but it’s a lot easier to read than all caps. Here’s a reference. http://www.sapdesignguild.org/resources/references/text_cap.htm
- Keep the background behind your text a light, plain color, with your text color at a nice, strong contrast. It will make your text much easier to read.
Know your target search keywords
A list of search term(s) that you want to send readers to a particular pages on your site are called the page’s target search keywords. You can pull some out of your competitors’ sites using the SEOmoz term extractor tool and run them through Google Trends to see which are the most popular. Then blog about these terms - it’s what your readers want to learn about.
Choose your categories wisely
- Add categories for each big term (or set of about 3 related terms).
- Keep those categories in mind as you create your blogs.
- Maybe choose one category a month, and create several blog posts for that category.
Create straightforward titles
Catchy headlines are for print, not web. People (and search engines) will sniff out your site using the titles, so make nice-smelling, straightforward titles.
Use descriptive link text
- Use terminology as close as possible to the target search term for the link’s target page. So, if the home page links to a particular forum post, make the forum post’s topic’s title the link text (If you get another web site to link to yours, see if they’ll let you suggest the link text they use - or, if it’s an image, the image’s alt text).
- Make sure the link text has the proper visual cues for your site’s visitors: underlined, colored, etc.
Blog regularly, and as often as you can handle
Blogging is a marathon, not a race. Decide how often you can do it, then try to blog regularly. It’s time consuming, so budget realistically. Twice a month is a good minimum. If you try to blog every day, it becomes a lot after just a few weeks.
Take advantage of your images
It’s very rewarding to see your images show up on Google image search. The following will help the image show up, and will help with the normal Google search ranking of its parent page:
- Use a meaningful image file name, and include potential search terms.
- Add alt text to every image HTML tag.
- Keep your images small and float them off to the right or left, so text will wrap around it. If you don’t, users will be tempted to stop at the graphic.
Last but not least, have fun doing it! Blogging would be boring otherwise, and then - if you’re like me - you will put it off and not do it. So make it enjoyable.
Happy Blogging!