Blog Best Practices (2021)
Blog Best Practices (2021)
You Reach When you’re blogging for your business or your client’s, it’s important to keep optimization at the forefront of your efforts.
But how exactly do you make your posts SEO friendly so that you can showcase your blogs to the people who matter?
What makes a business blog successful?
There is no quick blogging solution that makes all blogs successful. But there are blogs that get thousands of views and draw a lot of readers. So what do they do to become successful?
Here are some important aspects that make a business blog a success:
They are informative.
Great blogs educate their readers on topics they are interested in. They educate and train them to keep them engaged and win repeat readership.
Readers who find your content interesting will share it and come back for more information.
They focus on quality.
Quality is essential for a successful blog. A reader would rather consume 1,500 words of high-quality content, rather than 4,000 words of bad content.
To develop quality content, conduct research and verify information for facts.
They have clearly defined objectives.
Starting a blog should have a clear purpose and you should set goals for the results you want to achieve with your blog. Otherwise, you may be wasting resources in a misguided attempt to build your audience.
Successful blogs start with defined goals and know what they want to achieve.
They publish on a schedule.
A few blog posts is not enough to make a successful blog. Blogs require constant work, which means they have to be created and published on a regular basis.
Consistency is key. Select your creation days, editorial days and publication days and stick to them.
Check out some of blogging best practices to learn how to make your blog successful.
Blogging Best Practices
Here are 10 of the blogging best practices to help you acquire readers and web traffic.
1. Use keywords.
To start, brainstorm a long-tail keyword you’re trying to rank that is directly related to your blog topic. You can use sites like Moz to help you choose your main keyword based on considerations such as monthly search volume, difficulty, and organic click-through rate.
Make sure to include your main keyword in your blog title, URL and meta description.
There is no magic number that tells you how often this main keyword should appear in your post. You just want to make sure you’re writing compelling content and working in that keyword it naturally fits – don’t feel the need to force it.
In addition to your main keyword, you can also add some other keywords related to the topic in question.
2. Use clickable titles.
Make sure your title consists of common, uncommon, power, and emotion words to drive more traffic, shares, and search results.
DeCoSchedule Headline Analyzer from is a great tool to get you started – if your title is 70 or above, you’re doing a great job! However, the best way to blog to include your main keyword in the title sometimes makes it difficult to get your title at position 70 or higher.
Just remember that while you want to aim for 70+, it’s more important for you to include your main keyword and give your blog a title that is accurate rather than misleading to your audience.
TLDR: Your title cannot exceed 70 characters.
3. Choose a niche and stick with it.
Part of the purpose of your blog is the topics you decide to write about. Business blogs can choose niches specific to the industry or specialty. This will help you become an expert in your field and people will start to see you as a thought leader. So pick a niche and be very, very good at it.
Whichever niche you choose, you need to make sure your blog readers know what to expect when they visit your blog.
If you run out of topic ideas for your niche along the way, check out your competitors’ blogs who write about your niche and constantly research keywords and trending topics.
4. Write accurate meta descriptions.
Google previously increased the character limit for the description snippet field to 300, then reduced it to approximately 160 characters five months later.
While often overlooked, meta descriptions are quite important as they appear on Google’s search results pages and serve as a description of what a specific page has to offer.
Metas should be an accurate, solution-focused representation of what people can expect when they click through to your link. While a blogging best practice says to include your keyword strategically in your meta description, make sure you don’t overuse keywords – it can actually hurt your SEO efforts.
TLDR: Meta character limit on a desktop = 160 characters; mobile = 130 characters.
Write content for your audience.
The content you want to write and the content your audience wants to read are not always the same. Find out what your audience wants, what their problems are, and how you can help them with your content.
Write about the issues your audience really cares about. They don’t want to know what you’re doing, just what can help them. For example, if you sell tires, don’t talk about tire making. Discuss how to choose the right tire for their vehicle and which tires are best for each terrain. Https://giphy.com/embed/FCADC8wxeicDK
via GIPHY
This is helpful and they might just consider buying your tapes in the process.
6. Add blog tags.
By blog tags assigning categories to your blog posts, readers to the subject they are looking for easy to find.
Think of tags as content themes on your website and blog topics. One tag should cover a variety of keywords and topics you posted about, and you should no longer assign three tags to one post.
Make sure the tags you choose are diverse and not just repetitive from each other as this can actually hurt your SEO efforts.
7. Link internally and externally.
If applicable, including internal and external links in your post is a good blogging best practice.
In addition to reviving some of your old content and helping readers find what they are looking for, internal links can help emphasize the validity of your own website.
You can link to other blog posts or to your web pages. External links to reputable sources and authoritative bodies help build the credibility of your content as you provide your readers with other useful educational resources.
8. Post often.
Posting on schedule is important, but often posting is even more important. Posting at least one blog per week is not good enough. People want new content and they want it fast.
Not only do your readers want updates, Google loves updates too. This means that often posting and adding updates to old content is good for SEO. Updating your old content is a great way to refresh your blog if you have a library of content that needs new data, depth, and any other updates to make it more relevant.
9. Write great content.
It may seem contradictory to best practice # 8, but your blog needs good content that gets posted often. It’s time consuming, but creating a great content strategy can help create and publish blog posts that seem like second nature to you.
Great content should be:
- Well-written
- Organized
- Entertaining
- Relevant
- Consistent
Taking the time to tick all the boxes will help keep people coming back to visit your blog. Sometimes you only get a few chances to prove you have great content, so keep your quality high from the start.
10. Promote your blog and drive engagement.
Promote your blog as often as you create content. To do this effectively, you need to start by knowing where your audience hangs out on the Internet.
Find out which channels work best for your audience and promote your blog posts on those channels. And most importantly, be present and encourage involvement.
Ask questions, leave comments, and start a conversation with your community. Ask your readers what they thought of your post. This will help create a relationship between you and your audience, and they will come to trust your authority on certain topics.
With these blogging best practices in mind, you are on the right track to building a better blogging strategy and creating quality content for your readers.
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