10 Vital SEO Steps to Take Before Publishing a Post
Wow!! I know you just finished writing a killer article with lots of qualities, fresh ideas and engaging points which will interest your readers and you think after all the Researchs and Proofreading, it’s time to hit the publish button.
I think you should wait a little and read this!!
Many bloggers makes this little mistakes and later on their called quality contents doesn’t drive huge traffic they expected to their blog, they start thinking, is something wrong somewhere? Why is my article having a low click through rate in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) ? Am I missing something? Of course you are. Their are some vital SEO steps to take before publishing a post you are missing out on.
Driving huge traffic to your blog from search engines doesn’t only depends on writing a unique/ rich contents, it solely depend on how attractive your article title and description is. If he likes what he see, trust me he is going to check it out.
How can I make my content attractive? Below I have decided to put up 10 vital SEO steps to take before publishing a post.
1. A Killer Post Title
70% faith of your blog been clicked in SERP is on your blog posts title. It doesn’t matter how good and unique your contents or the rank of your post in Search Results, if your title fails to impress the user, trust me visitots will never click. I have seen many posts with less information driving more traffic than a very comprehensive posts, why?
Because only your title and description are shown on search results not your detailed article.
Below is an example of two results from SERP on this keyword “Demo and Download Button”
Above is;
1. Add a Stylish Demo and Download Button To a Blogger Blog
2. Add Demo and Download button in Blogger
Out of this two search results, which one do you think will get more clicks? Of course it’s the first one, only because of the word “stylish” makes it attractive and interesting therefore increasing the CTR ( Click through Rate) of the post. So next time you are writing a great article make your titles very attractive, short and make use of adjectives.
2. URL Optimization
URLs play a very important role in SEO also. It is a must that you optimize your posts URL so that visitors can see what your article is about mere looking at the URL. Search Engines pays attention urls because it helps their bots to easily understand your content. Many bloggers using blogger platform doesn’t pay much attention to URLs because blogger automatically generate a permalink for your posts, but do you most of your important keywords got cut off from the links because blogger automatically makes a permalink with the first 30characters? The best option is to edit it, Optimize it with Keywords, keep it short, Simple and Unique.
Here is an example.
Blogger will automatically generate a url like: http://www.fancybloggertricks.com/2016/10/how-to-add-page-title-tag-to.html
Leaving out the important keyword “ a Blogger Blog “. This URL is not thesame with the post title but we can make it perfect by editing it to;
http://www.fancybloggertricks.com/2016/10/how-to-add-page-title-tag-to-a-blogger-blog.html
Now you have successfully Optimized your URL by add the missing keyword “a blogger blog ” to it. Now visitors and Search engines can quickly understand what your contents is above by just reading the URL. Don’t forget to do this everytime before publishing a post/article
3. A Flawless Intro
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| Gif Credits to Giphy |
Beginning an article with an amazing introduction will make your readers have more interest in what you want to offer. Your first paragraph must contain a unique intro and you must give your readers a little hint on what you are writing. There are many ways of drafting a stunning intro. Below are some few examples;
- Starting with Questions: These is very common between both Proffessional and newbie bloggers. Starting an article with questions has a great impact in engaging your readers because it tells them indirectly what they are going to gain.
- Tell a Little story: If you have experienced what you are writing before why don’t you share it with your readers. It’ll make them understand that you really know what dey are passing through
- Start with an Interesting Quote: An amazing quotes can also do the trick.
- Practice the TFAW (Think feel and Write) trick, I personally use this method in most of my articles and it never fails me. This is how TFAW works, you want to write an article that catch readers attention! Think of the problems they are facing, put yourself in that position and feel it now write what you think they are passing through.
4. Add Beautiful Visuals (Images)
This is one of the part I love most. Look I have put up a detailed guide on how to Improve SEO with Image Optimization . Using lots of images in your blog posts is a good way to increase interest, excitement and creative. You just finished writing that great article, don’t forget to add some cool photos that will make readers understand your article more. Here is a place where you can get amazing stock images for your blog posts. Take note, alway rename your images to related with the information shown in the picture.
Avoid using an image with the name: Screenshots215.png, instead, you can rename the image name to : how-to-create-a-blog.png.
Now with the above filename search engines can easily understand what information you are passing through in your images.
5. Use Your Keywords in Image Name, Alt tag and Title tags
As I have said above that images increases attention, interest and excitement, but is that all it does? No you can make them do more by adding Alt tag and Title tag attribute. Thousands of images are shown everyday on SERP each time someone search for a query. Alt tag and title tags are the things that makes google index your images and show them on Search results. In short, they are just a short description of your images.
<img alt=”Add lots of visuals” border=”0″ height=”332″ src=”example.com/creativity.jpg” title=”Add-images-to-your-posts” />
You can use some important keywords in the alt tags too, to increase your rank in SERP. You don’t know how to add Alt tag and Title tags? Read this
6. Add Meta Description To Each Post.
Blogger has made everything much more easier by giving you the opportunity to add Meta description to each article you write. Meta description is a brief insight of what your content is about. This improves crawling rate as well. This option is located at the left side of your post section, just below the option tab.
If you can’t find it, go to your blogger dashboard >> Settings >> Search Preference>>Then enable the Meta Tag option. Now go back to your post and input a short and quick description of your article.
TOP 10 BEST DOMAIN NAME AND WEB HOSTING REGISTRAR
7. Link to Older or Related Posts
Before publishing a post, always try to link back to other related content you have written as this makes it easier for your readers to understand more and it is also a Pageview Propeller. As a blogger you should use this method to make your readers stay more longer on your blog. If your new article contains some keywords you have written a post on, you can interlink them together. Search engines also finds it very easy to crawl your contents by linking to older articles. Make interlinking to older posts a must before clicking the publish button.
8. Easy and Simple Article Layout
What will you do if you come across an article of just 500words with no paragraph, heading and words highlighted in bold? Am sure you will lose interest immediately. Before writing an article, have a plan on how you want your contents to go.
Don’t just write in Plain text, make use of the following.
- Breakup your post into Paragraphs
- Highlight important Keywords with Bold.
- Make use of Sub-headings and Minor heading
- Underline Important Sentence.
Doing these will catch your readers attention and make them want to read every inch of your content. Don’t forget to use colors as well.
9. Proofread your Article
We are always in a hurry to complete a post therefore we don’t check for errors at first. It’s a must you review and proof read your blog post before clicking the publish button. There are tons of online editing and proofreading services out there but some of them only look for errors in yours spellings not in grammatical errors. So I advise you read your content over and over again before publishing. Here is also a great tool that will help you out in finding both grammatical errors and wrong spellings. Here
10. Conclusion
After implementing all the above steps, your conclusion is the last chance you have to make your readers drop feedbacks and revisit the Next day, so don’t spoil it. You should always conclude your article will a powerful sentence, which will contain your main title and a brief summary of your content in just few words. Ending an article with questions seems to be the best way to make visitors comment. So make sure you end up with a unique conclusion before hitting the publish button.
