To make your blog successful it is essential that you know what is an important component of each entry. Posts should for instance have a basic struc­ture and are at least bro­ken down into paragraphs. Posts, however, are not cluttered with links to your site.

Here are 10 additional criteria a quality post must include:

10. Relevant Content

This means relevant, interesting and timely. When I visit a website and find top posts from 2007, I ignore it.

9. Informative and Educational Content

Nobody wants to read something that is purely product based and self-promotional. With so many blogs out there, your content must really be engaging and stimulating as well as unique.

8. Quality Images

This doesn’t mean posts should be littered with images, but they should have quality, relevant, supporting images that outline the point of the content. Graphs and diagrams are very helpful as well as screen shots if applicable.

7. Proper Grammar and Spelling

You don’t have to be Hemingway to have a blog, but when I am reading a blog post written in English, with poor grammar and sentence structure, I rarely continue reading…it’s just not enjoyable.

6. The article is organized well

Organize your intentions using an outline format. Start with a draft and step by step to help prevent rambling and dragging out your content. Quality blog posts are written by people who know what they want to say and that do so clearly. A good way to lay out your content can be the following:

5. Don’t Push Your Product

Going back to #9 a plug here and there is fine. An article written for the purpose of promoting a product or service should be incredibly rare. If you want to talk about your product only then consider have a separate blog for just your product and/or services, that way people can receive and follow that information by choice.

4. Strike a Balance

You don’t want your posts being too long or too short. Think about roughly 400-600 words. Some will be longer and other shorter. This is a good guideline and will help keep people’s attention longer.

3. Use Bullets and Lists

Top “trends list” or “3 things you must know” type of posts are extremely popular and common.  This isn’t a coincidence.  People like to read posts with nice, simple presentation of information, just like this one. Give it a try.

2. Provide a Take-Away

Excellent content leaves the reader with something new they didn’t have before.  That is why tutorial posts are so very popular.  People like to get something from blogs they read.

1. Have a Call to Action

Every web page should have a clear Call To Action (CTA) and the same is true of blog posts. With e-commerce web­sites that means encour­ag­ing vis­i­tors to pur­chase items, with small business sites it means encour­ag­ing them to click a link and go to a landing page. The end of your blog post is the begin­ning of your inter­ac­tion with read­ers so get them to take the next step and request more information via your offer shared (hint: this is the place you can be semi promotional…showcase the fact that you are indeed the subject matter expert).

That’s it! Just remem­ber, writ­ing con­tent that helps read­ers isn’t enough any­more. As the inter­net grows, read­ers get more and more used to copy with more than just qual­ity con­tent. Your writ­ing style is almost as impor­tant as your actual con­tent, so take these tips to heart!

Photo credit: www.taintedcanvas.com

You have to know when to make changes. Obviously you want to make edits to your overall strategy or even minor tweaks when needed. But when do you make these changes? When is the best time?

Quite simply – most often your changes will need to be based on data. Analyzing your traffic sources, based on keyword traffic, referring sources, pages most frequently visited, goals met etc will be the most common factors. Based on data like this you should assess your strategy on a monthly basis and make a plan to change things about 3 – 6 months into the start of your SEO and every 1-3 months from there. But don’t let that be written in stone, here are more reasons when to switch things up…

6 Reasons You Know It’s Time To Change

1. Positive Keywords – if keyword A brings in lots of traffic make sure that corresponding page has supporting content for that topic
2. Make a clearer conversion path – make sure there are calls to actions and landing pages tied to pages
3. Negative press/keywords – if you see people searching for negative things – like bad reviews. Take action. Here’s your opportunity to jump into forums, set up review profiles, create a new campaign, press releases, social media etc…you name it. The worst thing you can do is nothing or react negatively in return.
4. Following on the tails of the before mentioned, make sure you are adding yourself to review sites, better business bureau, and other directories that matter. They help you with inbound links, a positive image and appear less like spam.
5. Take it a step further, create a campaign around large traffic generators. With success from basic optimization efforts you can easily take things to the next level – video, email, pod casts, blog posts, call to actions, events, contests…the sky is the limit.
6. Test, test, test. True SEO geeks will test to no end even if things are going well. It’s only through testing (anything and everything) that you will be able to truly see what counts and what has a positive or negative effect.