What To Do Before You Publish A Blog Post

Create Your Blog Post

Create an outline and write your blog post.

Readability and Formatting

• Check to make sure your blog post is organized, easy to read, and visually appealing!
• Use headings and subheadings such as H1, H2, and H3 tags for readability and easy navigation.
• Use bullet points and lists (unordered and numbered). This can break up text for easier reading.
• Make sure to use consistent fonts, styles, and formatting, for a cohesive design.
• Always use at least one photo in your blog post (of course there are a few blogs that don’t use photos). Make sure to set a photo to a featured image so that when you are searching for a blog post, it one photo shows up as a main image.
• Consider using other multimedia to attract and keep attention to your blog posts. Multimedia can include: videos, polls, graphics, gifs, memes, etc.
• Add a call to action. Encourage engagement through prompting comments, shares, or subscriptions.

High Quality 

Always post high quality blog posts. Google wants to rank the best posts towards the front. They want people to find the most helpful search results that match their search, instead of scrolling endlessly for a search match. And they want you to click on a page and stay on the page (remember Google gets ad revenue).

Posts that get a lot of shares are also high quality!

Long Tail Keyword

Always use at least one long tail keyword in your blog post. You can insert it in your URL, meta description, title, alt text and title for your photos, in the first 150 words of the blog article, and through out your post.

You don’t want to miss out on the opportunity to rank for a keyword on Google. Look for a keyword that you have a good chance of ranking for on the first page of Google. For example, you may want to find a search term with 200 monthly searches that is labeled as low competition.

Optimize SEO

• Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to easily add your SEO data to your posts.
• Add outgoing links to other websites and interlinks linking to other pages in your blog.
• Add a “Related” or “You might also like” section at the bottom of each blog post that links to other blog posts to encourage readers to stay on your blog longer.
• You want to give Google (a search engine) as much info as you can about your blog post so it can effectively rank it.
• Only add your blog post to one “category.” Otherwise Google assumes that if you put a blog post in more than one category it is low content.
• Use an attention grabbing title to peak someone’s curiosity and so they click on your article.
• Make sure your URL is relevant and concise. For example it could read “yourblog.com/how-to-start-a-blog,” not “yourblog.com/”how-to-start-an-awesome-blog-today.”

Proofread and Edit

Use tools like Grammarly or Grammar Check to catch spelling and grammar mistakes.

There you have it, a checklist to use before you publish a blog post! Over to you, what do you like to do before you publish a post?