Starting a new blog can be overwhelming, especially if you're heard of all the little tasks that need to be done, but are not sure of what they are.
As a client subscribing to my SEO Inspection service, you will receive topic and keyword instructions each month to guide you to write your next blog post. Once you've written your blog post you need to make sure the post is properly set up. Here are the steps.
Here's how to add your blog post.
Create a new post, and only add the post title, then publish the post privately. For more details on this see how to start a new blog post.
Add content to your blog post. Keep close to the word count that I have advised for the particular post you are writing. The paragraphs must be short. I normally restrict them to one or two sentences.
Make sure all headings are created using the heading block, and not just a bolded paragraph block.
Where possible, use words in your headings that are to do with your topic.
Your post may not require any images. But if it does, bear in mind that images can drag your site down in terms of performance, so any that you place must be optimised. Also consider the orientation and positioning of images and how you want your page to look.
Given that most people will view your site on a mobile device, I prefer not to place images on the left or right with text wrapped around the image. On a phone that wrapped text formatting will be lost anyway, so why bother.
I normally place blog post images straight down the middle of the page in a landscape orientation.
Images used in web pages must be lightweight. Overall page weight - which is affected dramatically by the weight of any images - is a ranking factor. But you can influence image size and weight directly by ensuring your images are optimised.
If you have an image intensive site, for example a recipe blog, I don't recommend using the WordPress media library for hosting blog post images. I have other strategies for dealing with large numbers of photos on WordPress sites. If you're my client I will explain these to you.
But if your site is not all about the images and you only use photos on the odd blog post, then keeping them in the media library is fine.
This is how you place an image from the WordPress media library.
If you have no images of your own then maybe do without. Unless you are very skilled at image editing, stock photos will look like fake content and that will drag your site down.
Don't use stock images just because your blog niche cannot generate its own unique images. (There are exceptions to this, and I will explain a method of using stock images that works well, in another post).
You can still use stock images for social media posts though.
When a blog post is promoted on social media, any social media image associated with it will appear (as if to represent it) on the social media platform.
This is achieved by supplying an image specifically for this purpose. The image does not have to be the same as any of the images you may have already used inside your blog post, although it can be.
I tend to use a different image to any I may have used in my blog post. I use a service like Adobe Spark or Canva to create a specific social media image.
Once you've created the social media image you can quietly add it to your post, "behind the scenes", but in such a way that it will be found by Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Once the social media image is added, you can use the Facebook Debugger and the Twitter Card Validator, to ensure that your post is ready to be shared on social media.
If you're a client of mine, I will take care of some the more technical items in this list, but as a blogger you must become comfortable with optimising blog posts.
SEO (search engine optimisation) depends on may factors, but the main ones are
In order to rank and generate traffic with content, the blog needs a lot of content. It also needs frequent new content if you are a new blogger trying to establish a new site. The pressure to post frequently is less onerous when you have a large site. You still have to write blog posts, but you'll be able to do it at a slower and more considered pace.
Assuming you have taken care of most of the above list, each blog post also requires the basic SEO settings. As these will probably appear in the search engine results listings when someone performs a search, it is important that whatever you write is enticing and persuasive.
Hand craft each meta title and meta description.
Once you have finished the post, check that the publish date is correct, and then publish it publicly.
Next go to your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts - at the very least - and share your post URL to all your followers.
Because you have taken the trouble to write all the titles and descriptions for social media and have provided social media images, assuming you have sufficient followers on each platform, you should be able to look forward to some shares and retweets.
