In the digital marketing world, blogging goes way beyond simply filling up a Word document. In fact, it has become a necessity for all businesses trying to succeed in content marketing. According to reports, marketers who focus on blogging are 13 times more likely to show a positive return on investment than their counterparts. It is a powerful and consistent way to reach out to the masses through your expertise in your respective industry. In fact, a daily or weekly updated blog is the best way to demonstrate authority. Through showing your knowledge and expertise and proving to be a valuable resource of information for readers, a blog can massively improve the SEO rankings of your website and increase web traffic.
But the question is, what practices can actually help your blog drive in ample web traffic?
Write Concise and Short Paragraphs
People hardly read content in-depth on the internet these days. In fact, they are more likely to just scan through it. So, if you are trying to keep people engaged with your content, you need to make sure that it is broken into concise and short paragraphs. Research states that if you are lucky, people might read over 20% of what you have crafted. The other basic problem with long blocks of text is that they have poor readability. They can look like they require too much effort to understand and make someone lose interest. Lack of interest in your content will eventually result in people leaving, which notifies Google that your content isn’t what the user is looking for. So, whenever you can, break your paragraphs into smaller chunks.
Maintain the Right Word Length
When it comes to blog writing, the terms “boring” and “really long” are usually synonymous. That’s right. So, avoid writing filler content just to extend the word limit in an attempt to meet the Google rankings requirements. However, if you actually take a look at the statistics, a 200-word blog can often outrank one that contains over 2000 words in it. Nevertheless, the best would be to aim for approximately 600 to 1500 words. There is actually no particular rule as to how long your article should be, but maintaining a moderate length will help you to consider the topic you are writing about from all angles. You can cover all aspects like the what, where, why, how and when of the topic within this limit.
Use Keywords
To begin the process of using keywords, brainstorm a few long-tail keywords that you can try ranking for that are directly relatable to the topic of your blog. You can make use of notable websites like Moz to select your primary keywords on the basis of aspects like difficulty, organic click rates and search volume. Make sure that you insert the main keyword in your URL, headers, meta tags as well as the blog title. There is no fixed guide for the number of times you use your keywords across your post. Your aim is to simply ensure that you create a compelling piece of content and use the keywords wherever they fit naturally.
Craft Accurate Meta Tags
Though we often tend to overlook them, meta descriptions are extremely vital as they are visible on the Google search engine ranking pages and pose as descriptions of what the concerned page has to offer to viewers. Meta descriptions must be a solution-based accurate representation of what people can look forward to when they decide to click on your link. The recommended character limit for meta descriptions is 160 characters or less. In addition, meta titles are equally important, although much more limited. Moz recommends keeping your Meta Titles below 60 characters in order to ensure they are displayed properly. While one of the best blogging practices is to use the main keyword in your meta description and meta titles, avoid including too many keywords into it as that can be detrimental to the SEO efforts.
Use External and Internal Links
One of best blogging practices used to drive more traffic is to include external and internal links in your post wherever possible. Apart from reviving some old content and helping your readers figure out what they are looking for, using internal links helps you establish a hierarchy on your website. Link other web pages as well as blog posts. Linking your blog post to some authoritative bodies as well as reputable sources can increase the credibility of your post to a great extent.
Design Your Blog
Designing your blog is all about finding the images, fonts, spacing and so on that work for you and your reader. It is more than just the outside appearance, designing your blog can actually offer great benefits that will improve SEO and page loading times. For example, the size of an image can greatly affect the loading speed of your page. So, refrain from choosing images that are very large as they might unintentionally turn your readers away.
Increasing Web Traffic Through Your Blog
Not all of us quite understand the importance of following the best practices for blog writing. However, the aforementioned tend to have a great impact on the performance of your blog on Google rankings and also on the way readers perceive it. The ultimate aim of your blog, be it in your own business or in your client’s, is to maximize traffic as much as possible. The more traffic, the more likely you are to generate leads and sales. So, if you have not already, it is time that you adapt to a few of the above practices for best results!
