Things to Know When Writing and Publishing a Blog

What I want to cover here on this article is how to write and publish a blog from SEO, grammar, image, and technical aspects on a WordPress website or blog. 

Writing blogs is a bit different than regular writing in the fact that most things are read on a small mobile device so smaller chunks are easier to read.

More on that below.

I install a theme on all my WordPress websites that are known as mobile-responsive which means that all pages and blogs will show up very well and readable on mobile devices like cell phones and iPads as well as larger devices. 

Your articles will go from a horizontal view that you would see on laptops and desktops and the switch to vertical view for smaller cell phones and iPads. 

The theme on the WordPress website should make the transition between the two very well automatically and seamlessly if it is mobile-responsive. If not, you will need another theme.

I use what is known as a premium theme that costs extra instead of a free one because they have worked out the issues with mobile-responsive but supplies you with great page builders and other extras that are worth the investment.

Writing

I recommend typing out your blog on a Word document. It is very easy to just copy and paste right into a WordPress website. Other website platforms may work just as easy.

Make sure your grammar is the best it can be by having a second set of eyes look over what you have written. You want to put your best foot forward and do not want to turn off people with bad grammar. 

Something that I found that is very helpful is by reading out-loud what you have typed out. For some reason, it seems to help pick out mistakes in grammar and sentence structure. 

Use a FREE grammar assistant app called Grammerly. It works great and cleans up my mistakes and gives me many choices in the correction process. It’s fast and easy to use. 

From Google’s standpoint…

…blogs should be at least 300 words or more. More the better. Sometimes I write short articles around 300-500 words but many times I write them over 1,000 words. It always depends on the topic. To give you an idea, this blog post that you are reading right here is over 1,400 words.

To promote your business or organization, you may want to post something at least once a week at the beginning of the life of your website. This helps with the SEO of the site but also you gain traction on social media and start building a following.

Sometimes if I have written out an usually long blog of lets say, 3,000 words, I will make it a part 1 and a part 2 that will be published a week or two apart. I may write up and publish Part 1 and then need time to think and write up Part 2 a week or two later. It hard to keep the attention of your reader with super long blog post unless its a how-to article and you are trying to teach people how to do something.

You want to published regularly depending what type of business or organization you are. They say that publishing 2-4 times per week provides the highest results in both traffic and conversions. I do not blog that much because of all the other work I do and blogging can take time in research and writing out the articles but I do understand the importance of blogging and reaching new clients.

To read more information on blogging frequency go here to Content Marketing. or LeadG2.

Write in Smaller Chunks

Most of the time good prose should be written in longer paragraphs but not so with blog articles. Go ahead and write your article like you normally would do and then go back and break up the paragraphs into small one or two-sentence bites. 

They are then much easier to read on a mobile device and it gives you a chance to add header tags (H1, H2, H3) which are important for SEO. More on that below.

What is SEO?

SEO (search engine optimization) how search engines help people find things. When people type in things on a search engine like Chrome, Firefox or Safari that are connected to Google, Bing or Yahoo it will understand what is being asked and then it knows where to find it.

Install a free tool or plugin on your WordPress websites called Yoast SEO that will allow you to add important information for search engines. 

Several things help the search engines find your blog are the focus key phrase, title tag and meta description that are inserted into Yoast and then you add different header tags into the blog itself. 

Yoast is pretty cool because it also keeps track of all these different parts to make sure everything is like it should be for search engines by using different color-coded symbols to let you know where you stand on each element and what needs to be fixed.

Focus Key Phrase 

This is the all-important key phrase. These words contain what your article is all about. You can have only one keyphrase, so you want to be creative here. This should also correspond to the title of the articles.

Title Tag or SEO Title

Your focus key phrase should go in the first part of the tag. Then you have the option of putting different elements after that. I usually put the website name and if there is enough room something else. Remember you should not use more than 68 caricatures, or the title will not display properly in the search. 

Directly below is how I made this SEO title for this blog. 

Things to Know When Publishing a Blog | WordPress | SEO

Slug 

This is the key phrase that will go into the URL. Make these lower case with a hyphen between each word. Yoast will take care of this for you when you tell it what the key phrase is. 

things-to-know-when-publishing-a-blog

And then what it looks like in the URL

https://bestwebsitesolutions/things-to-know-when-publishing-a-blog

Meta Description

This is the area that you can put a short excerpt about what your blog is all about. You will want to put the title at the front and then more info to make people want to read what you have written. You can consider this your advertising for the blog. Remember you can not use more than 140 caricatures, or the description will not display properly in the search.

Directly below is how I made a Meta Description for this blog. 

“Things to Know When Writing and Publishing a Blog” using WordPress. Covering All aspects. Article size, words, photography, SEO, Google Console, eMail and publishing.

All together it should look like this from the Yoast plugin tool:

Things to Know When Writing and Publishing a Blog

Photography

Photos are a big deal on a blog. It helps to break up the article and keep people focused.

You need one for the featured image. 

This image will display at the top of your blog and then it will follow your blog wherever you decide to post it on your social media posts, and it will also show up when you automatically send out emails. 

I make this image a little larger than I do the other images that will go in the blog itself because it has to fit across the top of the blog and you want it to come out nice and sharp. I make these 9×5 at 96 dpi

Rule of Thumb… 

…on how many photos to use on a blog depends on how many words are in the blog itself. I try to use one image for every 400 words. 

400-word blog I will use just the featured image. Thats the image that goes across the top and install that on the outside of the blog itself on the right hand side.

800-word blog. I will count the featured image along with one extra image to go inside the blog post itself. 

1,200-word blog. I will count the featured image along with two extra images.

I make these photos that will go inside the blog: 7×5″ at 72 dpi. You never want your images to be too large in size and dpi any larger than 72 dpi unless it’s your featured image because large images will slow down your website.

The featured image I make 9×5″ at 96 dpi.

I also have used a free plugin that shrinks down images even further that helps your website pages and blogs open faster called Smush.

You can also find the Yoast and Smush plugins in the plugin section of your WordPress website.

I wrote a blog you may want to read on How to Optimize Images for Faster Website Speed.

In Conclusion

This is more or less a compressive list of things to do to make your blog stand out and to be found on search engines. You may find there are other helpful things along the way that will make your blog work more efficiently to add to this list.

Another blog I wrote that may be helpful 8 Benefits Blogging From Your Business Website 

The internet and websites are always evolving and new practices are added all the time. Google is certainly changing how it looks with up-dates to its algorithms and how it crawls websites and blogs for relevant information. 

Keep your eyes open fellow blogger! 

Things to Know When Writing and Publishing a Blog

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