Writing a successful blog post is crucial for the success of your website. However, it can be difficult to determine what makes a good blog post. In this article, we will explore the anatomy of a blog post and show you how to create a plugin-generated checklist that you can use every time you write a blog post in WordPress.
The Anatomy of a Top-Quality Blog Post
If a blog post outline were a skeleton, its structure would be comprised of ten key points. Here’s a look at each of them:
1. A solid topic and focus keyword: Choose a topic that’s beneficial to your readers and find a related keyword that’ll help anchor your topic and help both humans and search engine spiders know what your blog post is about.
2. Compelling headlines and subheadings: Your headline is often the difference between a click or a pass. Use subheadings to break up your content and make it easier to read.
3. Proper formatting: Use subheadings, bold, italics, lists, and other similar elements to provide variety within your blog posts.
4. Meta descriptions: These are summaries that show up in search engine results. They let your readers know what to expect when they come across your page in search engines or on social media websites.
5. Media: Every post should include at least one image, and other forms of media if possible. Videos, infographics, podcasts, and audio files enhance the reading experience and encourage social sharing.
6. A conclusion and call to action: Conclusions help readers digest your blog content and decide what to do next, and a call to action encourages readers to engage with your blogging community.
7. Appropriate linking: Broken links can lead search engine crawlers to believe that your website is untrustworthy, which can cause your site rankings to plummet.
8. Categories and tags: Categories communicate to search engines the core concepts written about on your blog. Similarly, tags have a broader reach and should incorporate related terms.
9. Editing: Reading your article as a WordPress preview should be part of your routine. This is the best way to edit and proofread your blog post because it allows you to see the bigger picture and pick up on typos, structural problems you would have otherwise missed.
10. Scheduling: Once you’ve finished a post, you need to schedule it!
Creating a Pre-Publish Checklist
Using the Pre-Publish Checklist plugin, you can create a customized checklist specific to your own blog post structure and never forget a step. Here’s how to set it up:
1. Install the Pre-Publish Checklist plugin from the WordPress.org repository.
2. After installing and activating the plugin, you should see that a new Pre-Publish Checklist item was added under the Settings in your main WordPress dashboard.
3. Define what you want to happen when users click publish. There are options to enforce full checklist completion, add a warning when a user tries to publish without finishing the checklist, or to simply allow content to be published (even if the checklist is ignored).
4. Build your checklist. There is a default list of items available to get you started. To add new items just use the text field at the bottom of the page.
5. With the Pre-Publish Checklist enabled, you can easily check off items as they are completed. Depending on the setting you selected for your checklist action, you should see a warning if you click publish before completing the list.
Using a checklist can help you to get into the habit of creating better blog posts. Writing content that engages your readers and encourages them to take action doesn’t have to be impossible – you just need a checklist.
Incorporating the items listed above into all of your blog posts will result in a well-structured and engaging post that’s ready to be crawled by search engines and shared across the web. What would you include on your WordPress blog post checklist? Feel free to add to this list and share your thoughts in the comments section below!
