If you were to go skydiving and bet your life on a folded-up pile of nylon, you would first go over a checklist and make sure everything is just right with your gear.
The same principle applies to your blog content, if you don’t want it to crash and burn when it hits the internet. The following are eight critical elements that should be included in your blog posts:
1. Magnetic headline
If you’ve ever met with investors and made an elevator pitch—a quick two-minute presentation about your business—you know that the goal isn’t to get funding right then and there, but to deliver enough information so that the investors will want to hear more.
It’s the same with a blog headline. It has to:
- Give some indication what your article is about, and
- Make the prospect want to at least check out your first paragraph.
In other words, it needs to be magnetic—it needs to pull people in.
Sometimes adding emotional words to the headline will give it the added magnetism required. In other cases, the information you’re offering will, on its own, be enough of a draw. However, even when you’re presenting great content, spice up your headline with a word or two that will grab readers and make it stand out. People are moved to act by their emotions.
2. Compelling lead
I want to be very clear about how I’m using the word “compelling” here. In news reporting, a lead should pull together the important points of the news story. But that’s not necessarily true in a blog. The first sentence or short paragraph of your blog must compel visitors to read your second paragraph—you want to draw your readers in. Don’t take forever to get to the point, and make sure there’s sufficient build up so that readers will want to know more about the information you’re presenting and appreciate it once they understand your ideas.
3. Useful subheads
Subheads serve three purposes:
- They break up the type to make the page more visually appealing,
- They help your reader navigate to important sections, and
- They boost search engine optimization (SEO).
Disclaimer: Regarding my third point, it used to be we insisted on using keywords in one or more subheads, but this doesn’t seem as important anymore. I will explain this more in the next section when I touch on keywords; however, using descriptive phrases that capture your key “ideas” in subheads will probably help your SEO.
The first two points are always important. A long page of continuous type turns away a lot of potential readers. We’ll come back to this in the section on graphics. Also, once readers finish your article, they may want to jump back and go over a point; subheads should help this.
4. Informative and engaging body
The body is the “meat and potatoes” of your blog post. It can be about anything—from new, incisive observations that will revolutionize the life or business of your reader, or a funny story about what happened to you on the way to work yesterday. If you’re establishing your authority, you’ll want to author one kind of post; if you’re trying to develop a personal relationship with your prospects, you’ll want to author a different kind of post. The question is, “What’s your goal today?”
As I mentioned earlier, the old rule said you needed to include a sufficient number of keywords into the body of your article; however, recent experience and research has shown that keyword usage and density is far less important to Google today. Google’s algorithm is smart enough now to understand what you are writing about and index your articles properly for searches. Therefore, if you’re doing a good job explaining your topic, Google will understand; you don’t have to riddle it with robotic keywords.
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5. Appealing graphics
It’s a great idea to include graphics in your blog posts to illustrate points and break up text within the body of articles to make your pages more visually pleasing. Google measures the time spent on your pages, so your graphics, typography, and color scheme should work together to encourage visitors to stick around. Also, when you promote your content on social media, you should include a strong graphic.
6. Powerful call to action
Almost every blog article should have some kind of call to action, which can take a variety of forms and achieved through different tactics. Your first step is to decide what action you want your visitors to take. It might be to make a comment. It could be to read another blog on your site, or to check out a product or service you offer. You also could get a prospect’s contact information by offering exclusive content in exchange for an email address.
7. Relevant internal link
Do you like free advertising? We all do, right? This is one reason you should include links to other articles on your site in every new article you write. Would a real estate salesperson just show one room of a house to a prospect? Of course not, and remember, one of your main goals is to get people to stick around your website.
Further, internal links have always been considered good for SEO. I think they benefit your SEO because they increase the number of pages per visit and time visitors are on your site. I don’t think that the mere fact you include a link is very important; what’s important is visitors see the link as relevant to their visit, click on the link, and spend time on the resulting page.
8. Good meta description
The meta description is the snippet Google displays in search results. Left to its own devices, Google will grab the first sentence or two from your article. This, however, may not always be the best way for your article to appear in search results.
All of my previous points concerned what visitors see on the web page—this point is different. The meta description is in HTML code. If you have a WordPress site, a plugin like Yoast lets you easily compose your meta description separately so you can fine tune it.
You spend a lot of time creating written content for your website. Even if it takes a few extra minutes to go through the eight points I’ve mentioned here, it will be time well spent. Good blog posts have long life spans, so your efforts will pay for itself several times over.
RELATED: How to Make Money With Your Business Blog
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