Thousands of people are joining the WordPress blogging world every day. But if you want to stand a chance of being heard out there in the echo chambers of the internet, you need make sure that you make your blog posts as good as you possibly can. But how?
I’ve been writing WordPress blog posts for over 7 years now. I’ve had millions of views on the hundreds of posts I’ve written and some of it has even been made into a book. I’m definitely not saying I’m the greatest writer ever, but I have picked up a lot of tips. Most of it the hard way. In this post I’m going to share all the most important bits with you.
Get excited, we’re about to talk about WordPress blogging!
I’ll also point out the most useful resources I’ve found, and the tools I use. This stuff took me a lot of time to find and figure out.
Let me hit you with the bad news: it’s not quite as simple as just churning out a load of words and pressing publish.
You’re not just blogging for yourself, you’re blogging for two important customers:
- Your readers
- The search engines
The first of these is pretty easy to grasp but the second is a little more tricky. We all use search engines but if you’re new to online publishing you may not have thought about something called SEO. If you’ve come across this before, skip the next box. If not, it’s time for a 30-second lesson:
“Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) is the practice of organising and presenting your website in the most search-engine-friendly way possible. By optimising your website for search engines the higher it should rank when people search for the subjects you’re writing about.
There are so many ways to improve your website for the search engines. It’s a whole discipline in itself with some people making a full-time living from it. Several of the methods can be complex but in this post we’re going to focus on the key things you need to do for any particular post you write. They’re fairly simple.
Whilst there are tips and tricks that improve your SEO, the best thing you can do if you want to rank in the search engines is consistently produce relevant and useful content that people engage with. After all, that’s the stuff that the likes of Google and Bing want people to find when they search for a particular topic.
If you want to find out more about SEO, here’s a useful beginner’s guide:
Ok, now we’ve got the basics down, here are the best-practice steps you should follow when you’re writing any WordPress post. I’ve divided it into writing, editing, images / media and other.
You might find it useful to use this as a checklist when you’re writing, especially if you’re new to WordPress blogging.
Writing your blog post – 5 top tips
It’s not for me to tell you what to write about. You started your blog with an idea of what you wanted to cover. In the early stages you should write where your passion lies and hopefully your enthusiasm will come across to the readers.
Rather than tell you what to write, let’s focus on how to write it.
1. Organise your thoughts before you begin writing
This step takes about 2 minutes but makes an incredible difference to your post:
- It will make your writing flow more logically and coherently for the reader.
- It keeps you on track whilst you’re writing.
I use this technique in all my posts, all of the time. Before I begin writing, I set out the subheadings within the article that I’m going to write about. It’s nothing that can’t be deviated from later, but it gives a good initial outline.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you were going to be doing a blog about a new kebab shop in your local area. You might make a writing plan like this:
- Introduction & why I love kebabs
- How I heard about this brand new shop.
- Where it is and what they serve
- My initial impressions when I visited
- How I nearly died of food poisoning from their donner kebab (kidding).
- Summary
Its that simple.
Mmmm…. Kebab.
Of course there are lots of ways you could set this out. No approach is wrong as long as you think about what will be useful and interesting to your reader. Also consider what is the logical order that you want to present it in.
2. Just write
Once you’ve thought about a plan, it’s time to write.
Personally, I’ve found that the quickest and best way to write is to just go for it. Even if you’re not sure what you’re writing is that good, throw all your words down on the page. We’ll worry about editing it later.
Let your creativity flow for now.
3. Write as much detail as the topic needs
There’s no fixed rule on the number of words. Write sufficient detail for the subject you’re covering.
Your plan that you put together in step 1 will keep you on track. However, you will find that most of the top ranking articles on subjects have over 1,000 words on them.
That’s not incredibly hard to do. In the plan I wrote in step 1 above, I had 6 sections. If I wrote an average of 170 words in each I’d make the target of 1,000 easily.
Still, if I thought I was just writing filler for the sake of word-count I’d be comfortable doing less. Quality is better than quantity.
Further reading: https://problogger.com/blog-post-length/
4. Develop your writing style
It might take you a little while to find your voice when you’re writing. The exact tone that you take will depend on who you are and the subjects you’re writing about.
But a good place to start is to think about what you enjoy reading. That’s the same tone you want to take with your own writing.
In general, informal first person writing is what dominates the blogs out there. It’s what people like to read. If you can master this conversational style and throw in the occasional bit of humour, you’re onto a winner.
Most of the time it’s best to keep your writing fairly simple. This helps you appeal to a broad audience. You can copy and paste your writing into an app like Hemingwayapp.com to see suggestions on style improvements.
Don’t obsess too much about this though. If your style feels right to you and it’s going down well with your audience, there’s no need to simplify too much.
5. Respect the white space!
Of all the tips, this is one of the most important.
Nobody wants to see an enormous block of writing with no white space. Nobody.
White space is essential. By that, we mean paragraphs and headings (more on headings below). This really helps break things up for the reader, pacing them as they go.
Paragraphs shoud rarely ever be more than 4 sentences long. And sometimes, especially for effect, they can be shorter.
Sometimes really short.
How short? This short.
Editing your blog post
So, you’ve finished writing your article, you’re done. Right?
Wrong. Now you need to edit. This is just as important as the writing you’ve done. Arguably more important. Editing is going to make the difference between a good post and an average one.
Here’s my top 7 tips of editing posts:
1. Don’t edit straight after writing.
If you can, have a break between writing and editing. Coming back to the post with fresh eyes helps you spot things that need changing. When you’re coming to it afresh, you’re more in the position your readers will be. You’ll be able to edit more critically.
2. Edit on a phone (‘mobile device’)
Chances are that you’re writing your articles on a laptop or desktop. But a lot of your readers will be consuming your content on a mobile device so it’s worth viewing it from this perspective when you’re editing.
It makes a big difference. There can be a very different feel between mobile and desktop/laptop.
3. Be ruthless – more is less
When you’re writing your initial draft, you’re just trying to get all your ideas onto the page. At that point don’t worry too much about the quality.
However, in the editing stage you need to be ruthless. Many times you’ll find something that could be written better. In that case, take the time to improve the wording. Take the following paragraph, for example – it’s got lots that we can get rid of from the initial draft:
On many occasions, Often you’ll find sentences, even paragraphs, that aren’t adding anything to the overall article. If there is any text which is repeating a point or not adding value, remove it immediately. There’s no point saying something twice if it can be said once. Otherwise you run the risk of boring the reader and that can be bad for your blog.
4. Don’t be afraid to do several edits – but don’t overdo it
Don’t be afraid to re-edit your articles more than once. I’ve sometimes edited articles 5 or 6 times before publishing and spotted new things each time.
Of course, you have to draw the line somewhere or no article would ever get published. It’s much better to consistently produce good articles than to obsess over having absolutely perfect ones, which you rarely publish.
5. Use headers to enhance your post
Headers are a really important part of your post.
They signpost the main bits of the article and entice the reader to read that section rather than skip it.
In WordPress, you’ll see that your editing panel offers 6 headings which get referred to as h1-h6. To make something a header, just highlight that text and click on the particular header style you want from the drop down menu.
The question is, which header should you use, and when?
Use headers to mark out changes in content and help the reader. Your post title will usually be your H1, so your main subheadings will be H2, and the headings within that section will be H3, and so on. Let’s go back to our kebab shop post example to illustrate this:
H1: Blog post title about a new kebab shop that I discovered
H2: Why I love kebabs
H3: They taste great even though I have no idea what that meat actually is
H3: Every good night out seems to end up in the kebab shop
H2: How I heard about this brand new shop.
H2: Where it is located
H2: The menu
H3: Kebabs
H3: Burgers
H3: Drinks
And so on…. The above would be for quite a detailed post, but you get the idea. Each heading would have some writing below it. You don’t necessarily need to go as deep as H3, but for more detailed posts it can help.
If you’ve done your headings well, a reader should be able to get the structure of your entire article, just by reading the headings.
6. Make use of Bold, Italics and Lists
Again, these are really useful, easy tools that are within WordPress. Using them effectively will really improve the readability of your articles and focus the attention of the reader on key points.
Lists, or bullet points, are great because:
- They’re easy to scan
- They give the reader a break from blocks of text
- They grab attention
Don’t overdo it with any of these, but they can each be very useful in their own right.
7. Link to other articles both internally and externally
There are two types of links and you should make use of both.
- Internal links are to within your website. They help the reader find related, relevant content and remain on your page for longer. That will help your SEO.
- External links should be only to high-quality relevant websites. When you link out to one of these pages, both the readers and the search engines know that you’re producing quality, well-researched content. Again, this helps your SEO.
You must also make sure you link out wherever you have used the work of somebody else – such as a picture, under a creative commons license.
Pictures and Media
So, the writing is done, the editing is just about finished. Now you need to make sure that you’ve used other media to really set your page up nicely.
Don’t skip this bit. Images are really important part of enhancing the reader’s experience.
How many images should you use in your blog post?
Pictures add interest and variety that simply cannot be achieved with words alone. Look at most of the top websites out there: they make use of pictures.
If you look at a quality site like the BBC, they generally won’t go more than two full page scrolls on a standard phone screen without putting an image in. They are a fully professional outlet with access to lots of images so you might not meet this, but it’s worth aiming for something between 2-3 scrolls.
Best-practice to upload pictures in WordPress
a) Find an image
If you have an original photo that you have taken then this is great. These images will show up in image searches and, being something different to all of the stock images out there, may help draw interest to your site.
However, if you don’t have your own pictures then don’t worry because there are a ton available for free out there. These top sites – which will also tell you what usage restrictions there are on the photos – are:
https://www.pexels.com/royalty-free-images/
There are other similar sites if you do an internet search for ‘royalty free images’.
b) Optimise the image before uploading it
Save your image with an appropriate file name that describes it. E.g. “man eating large kebab.jpg” (don’t ask me why I’m sticking with this kebab theme so much!)
Then, resize and optimise it. The purpose of this is to make sure that the file size is as small as possible without compromising quality. Images with smaller file sizes load quicker for your readers, improving their experience. People hate waiting for pictures to load.
You can crop and resize photos online with a tool like http://resizeimage.net/. Resize it to around the width of your writing frame when your website displays on a laptop. For this website that is around 600 pixels (so we make the images be around 700 pixels wide, just to be on the safe side).
Then, when you have resized the image, compress it to make sure the file size is as small as possible. My preference for doing this is by using https://imagecompressor.com/
Once you’ve done that, it’s time to upload your image to WordPress.
c) Upload and title your image
When you upload an image to WordPress, it can go straight into your article. Just don’t forget to fill in the title, alt text and description. These can all read the same thing if you want to be lazy.
Personally, I don’t fill in the other box: ‘caption’, as I think that some WordPress themes don’t display the caption nicely. Try it for yourself. My approach, however, is to manually write a caption within the post below the image and then put it in light grey, centred italics.
Youtube and Giphy
These are brilliant media sources. If you can find a relevant video on YouTube then put it directly into your WordPress post. You don’t have to upload the video yourself, all you need to do is get the youtube link and paste it into your text editor.
If you want to use a gif then I recommend using https://giphy.com/ which has a wide selection. Again, putting one into your page is as simple as just getting the gif link and just copying and pasting into your article.
Cause for celebration….
Write an effective headline
It might sound strange to be thinking about the headline after having written and edited your post. After all, you probably had a fairly good idea what your headline was going to be when you started writing.
But now is one chance for a final check. List posts are effective (e.g. 8 things you didn’t know about kebabs”), so are titles with exciting sounding names (“how to make the greatest kebab in the world”) but you really need to strike a fine line between something interesting and something that’s clickbait.
Good titles should be no more than 70 characters so that they don’t get cut off in an internet search.
Honestly though, writing good blog post titles is a subject of its own. It’s worth doing some further reading on this. These are great starters:
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/a-simple-formula-for-writing-kick-ass-titles-ht
https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/07/17/headline-writing
Set a header Image
It’s worth making a header image. Typically, it’s worth putting this as the first image in your post, usually just beneath the post title.
This is the image that is going to be picked up by twitter and facebook when your image is shared, and you need to optimise the size of the image to do so.
A website like https://www.canva.com/ will allow you to put together sexy looking images for your site, for free. They will also automatically give you the right template size for facebook or twitter.
SEO
Almost everything you have done up to this point has helped you optimise your post for search. It’s time, however, for one last push.
Anyone publishing WordPress posts needs to have an SEO plugin. There are only two worth recommending:
- Yoast SEO
- All in one SEO pack
They both do much the same thing. Install whichever you like most – but only install one.
Both of them will add some functionality at the bottom of your wordpress post editor which will look a bit like this. In both of these you get to set the text that will appear when people search for your article.
Here you should edit the title and the ‘meta description’ (that’s the text that goes beneath the title) so that people will most want to click on it when they see it appear in a search.
At the same time, you should also set the keyword(s) that you want your article to appear in a search for.
And Finally…
That’s it, at last you’re ready to press the ‘publish’ button!
Don’t worry though, you’ll probably end up coming back to your post at some point to make some further tweaks and amendments. Especially if it starts to get a lot of traffic.
But for now, sit back and bask in the satisfaction of having published your post. Now is a good time to share it with the world, so if you’re active on any social media, get out there with it.
Hopefully you found this post useful. It might seem like there’s a lot to doing a good blog post, and there is, but it becomes quicker as you get more experienced.
If you think we’ve forgotten anything or you have any questions, just put them in the comments below and we’ll do our best to make sure we address them.