What are the core elements of writing a perfect blog post, and what should it include?
What does the perfect blog post include? Writing and creating a perfect blog post is a well-balanced mix of creativity, information, education, and a well-researched SEO strategy.
Did you know that 70 million posts are published on WordPress every month? That’s a truly staggering amount of content and gives you an idea of how much competition you have.
Anyone can write a blog, but writing a perfect blog post involves ticking all the boxes while ensuring the blog post itself is worth reading and adds some value to the reader’s life. In the following article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about writing a perfect blog post, including:
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1. SEO Metadata
When you post your blog or article, you need to do some SEO Metadata tasks such as adding a title, description, and URL.
Typically, we try to keep the title as relevant as possible while keeping it as short as possible but also include your main keyword or key phrase. It doesn’t need to be three lines long, as half will not be displayed in the search results. According to Zyppy SEO, the optimal title length is between 50-60 characters.
Your description should include your keyword or key phrase and be a descriptive sentence that entices someone to click on the link to your blog and learn more. According to Brightedge, the optimal description lengths for your blog post are 120 characters for mobile searches and 155 for desktop searches.
Finally, your URL should match your title, include your keywords or key phrases, be original, and avoid adding the year if possible.
2. Keywords and Key Phrases
We could write an entire book about how many keywords to use, where to use them, and how often to use them in the perfect blog post. However, you’ll probably find ten other books and blogs telling you the opposite.
Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing are careful not to reveal all the data behind keywords to avoid people manipulating search results.
As a general guide, I like to stick to one primary keyword or key phrase and several other related keywords. You want to include the keyword in the heading or title, sub-title, first sentence, and at least one sub-heading in your blog and then distribute it evenly throughout the article. I try to include the main keyword once for every 150-200 words of content.
There are a bunch of great tools available to help you choose keywords, including Google Keyword Planner, WordStream, and SEMRush.
3. Schema Markup
When we look at a perfect blog post, we see text, images, and videos, but search engines don’t see that. Search engines crawl millions of websites and pages every day, and they do it by looking at code.
If you want to create a perfect blog post, remember those search engine bots crawling and include Schema Markup coding such as Article, BlogPosting, and Breadcrumbs for SERP presentation. You can check out the Schema website for a complete list of all the Schema coding you can include in your blog.
4. Original Pictures, Images, or Graphics
Search engines love images, graphics, and pictures, and they love original ones even more. Be sure to include several images or infographics in your blog post, but don’t just throw them in. Take the time to add the title to the image, Alt attributes, and SEO for every image.
However, don’t go crazy with hundreds of images. Bloomtools recommends that you include approximately one image for every sub-heading and ensure the name reflects the image to better steer search engines toward your blog post.
5. Content Quality & Length
While every blog post can’t and won’t be a comprehensive guide or how-to article, you should aim for a minimum of 700 words. However, if you want to outrank your competition, and they’re all writing 2,500-word articles, that will give you a clear idea of the word length you need to aim for. Wix recommends the perfect blog post to be between 1500 and 2500 words.
Now, this is where you need to look at the topic. If you can write 1500-2500 words of informative, educational, entertaining, and relevant content about the subject, great. However, if you can’t, don’t. The average blog post is 1416 words, but only 14% of blogs are longer than 2000 words.
If you look at your WordPress Yoast SEO, they’ll tell you 300 words is the minimum, but if you ever want to rank, you’ll need to aim for 1500-2500 words of content unless you’re writing very niche content with low competition.
The average reader only spends 52 seconds reading a blog post. So, ensure your blog posts keep readers interested for longer by writing valuable content.
6. TOC with Internal Links
Adding a Table of Contents (TOC) at the start of your blog post will allow readers to jump to specific sections of your blog. However, this is a double-edged sword as it also allows visitors and readers to skip the parts of the blog they don’t want to read and reduce the amount of time they spend on your blog post or website.
By adding anchor links in your blog post, you can create a clickable TOC and allow readers to jump to different sections within the blog post.
Google loves internal anchors and will index these links as part of your post.
7. Use Structured Headings & Sub-Headings
When you write your blog post or during the posting on WordPress or whichever website platform you’re using, ensure that you use H1, H2, and H3 headings. Your main heading should be H1, your sub-heading H2, and your sub-headings throughout the article H3 or H4.
Try to space your sub-headings evenly throughout the article and aim for 100-200 words of content between sub-headings.
8. Internal and External Links
There are two types of links you can use in your blog post: internal and external links.
Internal links could be links to other blogs relevant to the topic, your Contact Us page, or services pages on your website, and jump links to specific parts within your blog post. You should include internal links in every blog post to help create contextual content relevance and aid in search engine crawling.
External links are links that redirect the reader to other websites online. I know what you’re thinking, ‘Why would I want people to visit another site?’ That’s a good point. While external linking to direct competition is never recommended, external links that back up facts and statistics or provide more information on the topic help to identify your content as relevant.
The top SEO experts believe that good external links are the most critical yet underutilized source of ranking power. Link to high-ranking, relevant, trustworthy, and popular websites. Don’t link to websites with low ranking, irrelevant content, or untrustworthy domains.
9. HTML Elements
Some of the critical HTML elements you should include in the perfect blog post are:
Bullet points
Tables
Numbered Lists
All of these elements are essential ways to extend the session duration of visits and how long people read your blog posts, but also improve the UX metrics and featured snippets that appear in search engine results.
10. Embedded YouTube Videos
Embedding YouTube Videos into your blog post is quick and easy, and most importantly, it helps to improve backlinks and enhance the visibility of your blog post. Ultimately, you want to embed links to the YouTube videos you create, but if you’re not at that stage, finding popular and relevant YouTube videos related to the topic is excellent.
Try to embed the YouTube video towards the end of the article. Otherwise, you risk people clicking the link to the video and never reading your blog post.
If you find a YouTube video you want to embed, right-click on it, select ‘Copy Embed Code,’ and add that directly to your post. You can check out this video, which explains the process of Embedding a YouTube Video, for more information.
11. Call-To-Actions (CTA)
A clear call to action will help users and readers engage with your blog post. The perfect blog is designed to generate an action. This could be to buy a product, purchase a service, or contact you to learn more.
How many CTAs you include in your blog is up to you, but don’t overdo it. The last thing you need to do is add dozens of CTAs throughout the article. Some bloggers like to add one close to the start, once in the middle, and once at the end. Others prefer to add a CTA to every subheading.
The Perfect Blog Post
By including all of the points we mentioned above, you’ll be that much closer to writing the perfect blog post. Remember, search engines value quality over content, which applies to a specific blog post and the number of blog posts you create.
Instead of writing two 700-word blog posts, invest some time creating one 1,500-word blog post with more valuable content.
If you need help with your brand, business marketing, or social media, including blogs and articles, to improve your search rankings, please don’t hesitate to contact us at 6° Media & Marketing. Our experienced and professional team not only understands the importance of online marketing, but we can help you grow your business organically.
You can contact us directly using the contact form, email us at info@6degrees.media, or even book a complimentary 30-minute phone consultation to discuss your needs.
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