Blog post checklist will allow you to maximise the benefits from your post or article. We write blog posts for different reasons. A personal blogger may write a post to share their experience with others. A Web Design Company may write a post to attract visitors to their website. No matter what your reasons for writing a new article are, the resulting benefit depends largely on the quality and potential popularity of your post.

Writing a quality blog post requires valuable time and research. You also need to spend time to promote your blog post using SEO, social bookmarking, content syndication and other promotional methods. The overall effort required makes it important to ensure you have taken the necessary steps required to make your post a potential success. The blog post checklist below includes simple steps that will allow you to leverage the maximum benefit from your blog posts.

1.Is the Title compelling?

The title of your post is one of the most important factors affecting readership. A compelling title encourages users to read your post. Certain types of titles such as ‘Top 10 lists’ or ‘How to …’ articles are popular among readers.

2. Are keywords included in title and page name?

In addition to a compelling title that potential readers will find appealing, it is equally important to ensure that the main search phrase is included in the title tag and page slug. Posts with keywords in its title and page name have a much better chance of ranking high on search engines for the relevant search term. Most blog and CMS platforms offer the ability to customise page names.

Please be aware that you will need to update the configuration settings on your blog in order to produce Search Engine friendly page names. E.g based on default blog settings a blog post titled ‘key mistakes in web design’ on our blog would have a URL resembling ‘index.php?cat=1&id=4’. Instead, the page-slug has been changed to ‘key-mistakes-in-web-design.html’ which is much better for search engine ranking.

3. Have main on-page SEO techniques been applied to the post?

In addition to optimised page title, other on-page optimisation techniques should be applied before the article is published. If you use WordPress then plugins like ‘All in one SEO pack’ will manage this automatically. Following are some tips:

• Meta tags including description should be optimised
• The main search term should appear towards the start and end of the post.
• Keywords should be included in Alt tags for images.
• Keyword should be in headings, bold or anchor text of on-page links where feasible

4. Has the blog post been proofread?

Although it may seem obvious, you should never publish anything on your blog before proof reading it thoroughly. It is common for bloggers to write articles late in the evening or when taking a break at work when concentration can be low and chances of making mistakes are higher. Spelling or grammatical errors can damage your brand and credibility. Proofreading also provides an opportunity to improve your post and make it more appealing for your readers.

5. Have you researched your keywords?

Keyword research is important for writing articles. If you want to drive massive traffic from search engines, you need to ensure you are using the same keywords that users are searching for. For example, it may make more sense to write an article titled ‘Custom Web design in London’ instead of ‘Bespoke web design in London’ as the phrase custom web design is searched almost 20,000 times a month on Google whereas bespoke web design under 1,000 times a month. Keyword volume and trends thus help you decide what keywords to focus on to get your point across. You can use Google Adwords keyword tool to find out the popularity of search terms.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

6. Is the post scannable and free of clutter?

Research shows that users prefer to scan through the content quickly before deciding to read the full content. Content should thus be appropriately organised into paragraphs, headings or sub-headings. Use of bullet points or lists is another great way to break up your content and make it can be scanned with ease.

7. Have you included media where appropriate?

Images and media improve the quality of your content. If you spend 5 minutes on You Tube, you are likely to find supporting videos for your post. Including a related video or videos will make your content more valuable for readers. Similarly, images help make your post more appealing and can also help to break up the content, making it more legible.

8.  Have you included internal links?

Good internal linking between posts helps search engines better index your pages as well as encourages users to remain on your blog and read further.  Linking to other older posts on your blog is a well know technique used by most successful blogs.

9. Have you included external links where appropriate?

Readers visit your blog for information or knowledge on a subject.  External links to posts or resources related to your topic can improve the value of your post for readers. It is also important to provide due references to other websites or blogs you have quoted or used while researching your article.

10. Have you included relevant call to action?

Finally, before you publish your post you should consider the use of relevant ‘call to action’ in your post. A good place for this is towards the end of the post as users are most likely to perform an action after reading your post. You could encourage users to register for a free eBook, sign up for your newsletter or buy a related product. If none of these are relevant you can provide links to additional resources.