Learn How To Create A Blog Post Everyone Likes and Reads

The amount of content pushed through the Internet on a daily basis is unbelievable. Everyone wants their fifteen minutes of fame. Create a blog post that will get you five minutes of fame – maybe for years to come.

What are you competing against?

• Twitter touts more than five hundred million tweets per day.
• Facebook has more than 800 million users logging on every day reading posts.
• Pinterest claims an average of five million pins per day from their pin happy members.
• Worldwide bloggers amount to more than one million.

With so much information on the Internet, there is only so much of your time to go around from your favorite websites, blogs, social media timelines, Googling, emails and the like. What can you do to get your blog post to stand out from the crowd? How are you going to write an article that not only you’re excited about writing but also others are excited to read – and most importantly share with their friends? How do you get the mass public to read your post besides just your blog followers? Follow the following steps and you will be on your way to answering these questions.

What is the blog post about?

The first thing to do before writing a blog post is to come up with the article’s “keyword phrase”. The key phrase is three or more words that will be the main topic of your article. One word key phrases are too broad. When Googling the word “Music”, Google finds 3.2 billion results. Do you really think your blog will outrank YouTube (owned by Google), MTV, Google itself, and Pandora? Not gonna happen.

Next, let us look at two-word keyword phrase. I Googled “Wedding Music”. There are more than five-hundred million search results. This is getting better than the 3.2 billion above. However, look at the search results. Do you think you will beat out two publicly traded companies, The Knot and Wedding Wire? You also see Bridal Guide, one of the most popular bridal magazines, and also Wikipedia, who Google loves.

Finally, we search for the keyword phrase “unique wedding music”. We narrowed down our search results to 166 million. However, look at the top results. The Huffington Post, LoveNote from Australia, Wedding Bells in Canada and A Practical Wedding. We are not saying you will definitely list in the top 3 results if you follow all of our guidelines in this article. However, maybe you list at the bottom of page one or the beginning of the second page. Bridal couples love doing research and will commonly go past page one of the results. Know your audience.

As for keyword phrases for your blog post, the higher number of words, the easier it will be to rank for that keyword phrase. These are called long-tail keyword phrases. Keep in mind that long-tail keyword phrases will bring in close to perfect customers and readers. Your article will be exactly what they are searching for on Google. Also, know that long-tail keyword phrases get fewer searches per month. Why do we only care about what Google thinks? Because they own more than 65% of all search share. Bing has about 19% search share and Yahoo has about 11%.

What are people searching for?

So, we have our keyword phrase “unique wedding music”. You also have YOUR phrase, whatever it may be. However, is anyone searching Google for your particular keyword phrase? The only way to be sure is to create a Google Adwords account. Just do it! Next, on the top navigation go to the Tools link and then Keyword Planner. Once in the Keyword planner, select the first option: Search for new Keywords and ad group ideas.

You will enter your keyword phrase into the keyword text area. However, we also suggest entering other keyword phrases that are similar to your main keyword phrase. Along with unique wedding music, we also entered unique wedding songs, special wedding songs, and special wedding music. This will give us a good idea as to what people are searching for in our keyword phrase space. Our results may surprise you. Three of the four phrases have less than 100 monthly searches. The winner is unique wedding songs at 1,000 monthly Google searches. Our blog post keyword phrase is now “unique wedding songs”.

Create a blog post – Write It

First and foremost, write an interesting article that will make people want to read the entire blog post. Maybe start with an interesting title (see below). People love lists. Examples: Top 5, 8 Popular, 10 DIY Steps, and so on. Keep in mind that you want to write an article that your visitors will WANT to share with their friends and followers on social media sites. Create a blog post that CAN go viral.

What are some common blog topics that could go viral?

• Celebrity topics. Everyone is searching for news on their favorite celebrities. Follow the bandwagon and get traffic. Specifically if they do something recent to be in the news.
• Current events and news. What is happening in your industry that is news worthy? For the wedding industry in Las Vegas, it was the the legalization of gay marriages in October 2014. Also look at events in your industry. CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas is always buzzing every January.
• DIY Projects. Many searches are done on how to make something. No matter your industry, there has to be something you can make in a step-by-step process and taking pictures to post within each step.
• Lists. People love lists. They can be about anything as long as the list incorporates your keyword phrase.
• Real life stories. People love to read about other people. They want to live vicariously through others’ experiences.
• Humor and Horror stories. People want to learn from others’ mistakes. Teach them through stories. People also like to laugh. Share funny stories.
• Check out Google Trends. What are the current hot topics people search for on Google.
• Conduct a Review. Review a product, service, company or whatever is industry related. You may even be able to get a product for free to review.

Pictures are key. They must help tell the story of your article. Be sure to have proper lighting when taking pictures, particularly with food. Try not to use stock photos. Smartphones create pretty amazing photos these days as a fall-back. Videos are even better – smartphones are great for those as well.

If you are using WordPress for your website, we highly suggest utilizing the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin. It is a must for any SEO specialist. The plugin will verify all of the following points are checked off the list.

• The post must be more than 300 words. 500+ words are better and 1000+ words are great. What we are trying to say is that the more, the merrier.
• Every blog post must have a minimum of one image. The image file must be named with your keyword phrase (unique-wedding-songs.jpg). The image must also have your keyword phrase in the alt text (added at the time of image upload).

  If you want to create a good looking image that will be the correct sizes for all social media platforms, check out Canva templates

• Utilize your keyword phrase in the blog post inside heading tags (H2, H3). H1 is reserved for the blog post’s title only.
• Be sure to link to at least two other blog posts on your website to keep readers on your site longer.
• Add one link to an outside authoritative website in your space (not a competitor). An example for wedding songs may include Wikipedia, CMT, MTV, and VH1.
• Add your keyword phrase to the first paragraph in the first couple of sentences.
• Utilize the keyword phrase throughout the blog post in natural grammar. But don’t over do it too.
• Do not use your keyword phrase on any other page or post. Google will get confused if you use the same keyword phrase multiple times and will devalue one of the pages if not both.
• Be sure to triple check for grammatical and spelling errors.

Is your blog post click-worthy?

By now I am sure you have searched Google as we have in the past and above images. You will notice the large phrase at the top of each search result – this is the blog post title. The sentences below the title is called the description. How good or bad you make the title and description will determine whether or not you get searchers to click to read your blog post.

The blog post titles must be more than 40 characters but 50-60 characters is preferred. Do not go over 70 characters as no one will see it anyway. Be sure to use your keyword phrase in the title and preferred at the very beginning. Finally, make the title click-worthy interesting! This is a must! Create A/B testing and get rid of one over the other and then do it again until you get the best results. Think about your audience and who you are competing against. Would you click on your own article?

Having a hard time to come up with a title that will exude CLICK ME? We found a tool that will do just that. It may even be used to create blog article ideas too. Check out Portent’s Content Idea Generator.

The blog post descriptions’ number of characters should be as close to 156 characters as possible without going over. Be sure to include your keyword phrase in the blog post description. Don’t forget to make the description interesting and click-worthy!

Final Task

Update your URL before publishing. Be sure to include your keyword phrase inside the URL. Separate each keyword with a hyphen. Remove any stop words like a, the, at, etc. Example: http://www.samplesite.com/unique-wedding-songs/

Final Thoughts

If you want to learn more about optimizing your website and blog posts, check out the Search Engine Academy for SEO webinars and classroom training.