Blog Post Checklist

Make Sure Your Blog Posts Are as Great as They Can Be

Before you hit the Publish button and set your blog post free to the online audience, run it against the following Blog Post Checklist to ensure it's poised for success. Omitting elements reduces the effectiveness of your blog posts, so think long and hard before you skip anything.

Keywords

Did you do some keyword research, choose the keyword (or keyword phrase) to target in your post, and use it effectively throughout the post?  You can learn more about keywords in the following articles:

• Popular Keyword Research Tools
• Tricks to Use Keywords in Blog Posts
• Use Long-Tail SEO

Categories and Tags

Many blogging applications allow you to categorize (or label) your posts and tag your posts with relevant keywords. This can help with search engine optimization (SEO) and improve the user experience on your blog by making it easy for people to find content that matters to them. If your blogging application provides this feature, make sure you use it!

Title

Your blog post title should be interesting and motivate people to click on the title link and read the complete post. Your blog post title should also use keywords when it's appropriate and relevant to do so. For help, read Tips to Write Great Blog Post Titles.

Content

Of course, your blog posts need to be interesting or no one will read them, and there is more to writing interesting content than the subject matter of your blog posts. Read the following articles to learn more about writing compelling content:

• 5 Tips to Write Great Blog Posts
• How to Write Scannable Blog Posts
• The Secrets of Blog Post Length
• 20 Blog Post Ideas
• 5 Ways to Think of Blog Post Ideas

Links

Try to include at least one link to your archive content in your new posts, and include links to other sites that you used as resources in writing your post or where your audience can find additional information. Not only does this help your readers but it also puts your blog on the radar screens of other site owners who will see traffic coming to their sites from the links in your blog posts. Of course, it's also important that you check to make sure all of the links in your blog post are working before you hit the Publish button.