Everything You Need to Do Before You Hit “Publish” on Your Blog Post

These are the essential tactics that you need to remember for every post you write:

Writing

• Download a copy of my Content Tracking Spreadsheet
• Website template contains only one H1 tag per page, unique to each page
• Convert text to/from Word with wordhtml.com
• Check your grammar with Grammarly.com
• Use straight quotes instead of curly quotes using this tool
• Check on mobile, desktop and tablet
• Does your writing educate or entertain? If not, don’t write it.

Design

• Keep spacing in mind
• Table of Contents (TOC) and Lists. Backlinko and BuzzSumo published their analysis of 912 million blog posts, proving that list posts do exceptionally well on social media
• Images and Collages
• Block Quotes
• Videos, Motion effects, GIFs
• Data Visualisation: Graphs, Tables
• Blocks of Color

Links

Are you tracking any important links?

SEO

• You can’t rank unless you are indexed. Put the URL of your new post into Google’s URL inspection tool
• Find what keywords your competition is ranking by putting those site urls into ahrefs, semrush, etc
• Find out what keywords have the most searched traffic by using answerthepublic.com, SEMrush or SERPStat to find “early stage content” (how, what, etc, questions)
• Run a pivot table to see what keywords come up most often based on what you found on your competitors and doing other keyword research. Sort by the frequency of times a keyword comes up and then by traffic
• Write a compelling title and meta description that includes the most searched for and most relevant keyword in the html title
• Put the second most searched keyword in the first H1 heading
• Put the 3th-5th most searched and most relevant keywords within subheadings
• Write a short summary at the top of a page that is 375 or less words for people who are looking for a quick answer. Make that summary easy to share and prevent people from bouncing. This can sometimes take the form of a checklist of under 10 items
• Include a table of contents that links to each section so people can quickly navigate to the information they need
• Ensure your page pass any “fake news” filters. Be an authority on your topic but don’t make claims or promises. For example, do this and you are guarenteed to be #1 on Google
• Is my page secured by using SSL?
• Link to your author biography. That page would say something about why you are qualified to talk on a matter
• Do a plagurism check using Copyscape or Google by putting 6-7 words in quotes. Are those words used elsewhere?
• Use rich media. Include a 20 second video (Here are some things you are going to learn. Make sure you read the 3rd paragph down….)
• Do you have a featured image? Create one that is original. Stock Images carry binary coding and are easy for Google to index. If you need help, consider a company like designpickle.com. Make sure that image has a description (examnple: “picture of x”)
• Are you taking into account accessibility for ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act). Don’t use photoshop to flatten text on an image. Instead use HTML and CSS to put text over an image. Make sure that your fonts are also large enough to easily read (using the size attributes of em and rm instead of pixels)
• Are you taking privacy into account? Do you have a GDRP policy?
• Is anything I am saying related to something else? Enter a link to other content within your content. Use words that are similar.
• If you are linking externally, it is find to use superscript numbers like “footnotes.” The goal is to have the link text to be unique. Link to somewhere between 3-5 authoritative references (.gov and .edu)
• Set a Google Alert for the short answer to all your profiles
• Check what your article will look like when shared or posted on Facebook and Twitter. Make sure your Open Graph and Twitter Cards are helpful and have a unique featured image
• Check Quora and Yahoo Answers and look for threads that are similar to the problem you have solved. Don’t put a link to your article but instead paste your short answer on these sites
• Make sure your homepage links to your article or have a featured post sidebar
• Get an expert to contribute a quote or some insights. Or, do you have something to contribute to their content? Ask them if you can get an interview or a 15 minutes podcast. The goal here is to get 3-5 links to each article before moving on
• Get others to contribute to you. Tell them that you mentioned them and ask them for feedback. See if they will mention you in one of their next posts (say “you could use the referral traffic. If you can, that would be great…”
• Consider writing definitions and answers to those definitions
• Look for posts that are using the “intitle” Google search query, filter by articles that are in the last month, look at all the pages and reach out to these people and ask them if they will link to you so your post can get more exposure
• Yoast XML Sitemaps: “excluded posts” tab > add posts to exclude
• No follow or hide items from internal search/indexation. Examples: Thank You Page > Reference: Rel=”nofollow”
• Make sure you XML sitemap is updated and contain no errors: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/sitemap-list?hl=en
• Image link with description:
• Images – dimensions on everthing to increase load time
• URL’s should be search engine-friendly with intuitive folder structure – Test
• Titles and Meta Descriptions are customizable for every page and different from the H1 tag – Test
• Pages with similar content efficiently use canonical tags – https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en – http://www.seoreviewtools.com/canonical-url-location-checker/
• Images include relevant ALT attributes – http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
• Images are optimized for speed without degradation
• Duplicate content issues related to the CMS (URL Parameters, etc) – https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en – https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/crawl-url-parameters
• Blog gives emphasis to subscription opt-in (i.e. Scroll-Triggered Boxes plugin)
• Blog posts and articles offer obvious but not distracting social sharing
• Website template contains only one H1 tag per page, unique to each page https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/googlebot-fetch?hl=en
• Use markup language when possible

For more on what to do after you hit publish, click here.