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How long should a blog post be?

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How long should a blog post be you may ask!

Every few months we get some new advice from a blogging guru saying that our blog posts need to be longer, or shorter, or that they should be broken up into 10 pages of bite-sized chunks… it can make you crazy. Let’s talk about this. How long should your blog posts really be?

It would be great if there was a magic
number that guaranteed best results, wouldn’t it? But that’s like asking
someone to tell you how long your conversations with other people should be.
Sometimes it’s nothing more than a few words or sentences; sometimes you have a
nice long talk. It all depends on how much you have to say to each other,
doesn’t it?

The same approach works well with your blog posts. Sometimes you’re sharing just a quick tip or a recipe for example. In that case something around 400 to 500 words will do just fine. Add a pretty picture and call it good. However, most SEO tools are going to be looking for between 600-700 words. Always make sure to include text in your image alt area as well!

Other times you want to go into a little more depth. You want to cover different aspects of a topic, share some examples and give your readers as much information as you can. In those cases make it as long as you need to make it. Long posts are great. They help establish your authority and if the content is great, they are often shared on social media. Plus long posts give the search engines a lot of text to sift through and give you more chances to rank for long-tail keywords. So, the reality is – there is no PERFECT post length.

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The best advice is to mix longer and
shorter blog posts. It will make your blog seem more natural and organic. Don’t
force yourself to reach a certain magic word count if you don’t have that much
to say on a topic. Keep it short and to the point. Your readers will thank you.

If on the other hand you have a lot to share in a different post, go for it. Break the longer content up into small paragraphs and help your readers stay on track with subheadings and bullet points. Make it easy to scan longer posts so your readers can get an idea of what the content is about before they commit to reading it all. And if you are looking for a quick way to write posts in under 10 minutes – check this out!

And if you’re finding yourself writing a
few thousand words, consider breaking it up into a series of blog posts
instead. It will help both you and your readers from getting overwhelmed with
one long post. Link from one part of the series to the next to make it easy for
your blog readers to follow along.

Above all, enjoy the process of writing and
pay attention to what your readers prefer. If your short posts tend to do
better, consider keeping your posts short and to the point. If you’re getting a
lot more engagement and social media shares on longer posts, combine a few of
the shorter blog post ideas into a longer one. And whatever you do, don’t get
hung up on a number of words.

Hey, come and check out our Facebook page and give us a like! We love to know what people are looking to learn in WordPress world! Our group, The Bloggers Bistro is filled with an amazing group of Female Entrepreneurs learning how to blog to promote their business, their passions and their voices!

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How To Write Attention-Grabbing Blog Titles

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The most important part of your blog post is your title, and attention-grabbing blog titles will – well, get attention!. If you don’t grab your reader’s attention with the title and get them to actually read the post, nothing you put inside the post matters. It doesn’t matter how great and helpful your content is. It doesn’t matter what offers or affiliate links you have in your post and it doesn’t matter who sponsored you to write it. If you can’t get them to read it, the blog post doesn’t do you much good.

And when it comes to getting free search engine traffic, your title is important as well (it is an important part of your SEO strategy!). It is the most important factor when it comes to getting your content to rank. Yes, there are plenty of other factors, but a good title with the right keywords in it will do more good than anything else you do.

How do you go about writing a good, attention-grabbing blog post title then? I suggest you start with a working title for your post and craft your content. Then come back and work on the finalized headline, implementing as many of the tips below as you can. (I have a great article here to help you!)

Make
it Interesting and Tell The Truth

You want to write an attention-grabbing headline. With that comes the temptation to hype it up and stretch the truth just a little bit. While that may get you some extra clicks, there’s a trade-off. You’ll lose credibility if you’re exaggerating or telling little (or big) white lies. You see a lot of those headlines on social media. You click through and end up disappointed because the post doesn’t fulfill what the title promised.

Instead, make it interesting without all
the hype and stick to the truth. A great way to do that is to think about
what’s in it for your readers.

Keep It Short and Engaging

Shorter titles tend to do better both with
click-throughs on your blog and social media. Keep it short and to the point
and think about engagement straight from the title of your post. Ask your
readers a question. Make a statement that makes them think. Put numbers in your
titles to get them thinking about what’s in the content (i.e. My 5 Best Tips To
…)

Keep an eye out for titles that catch your
attention. Copy and paste them into a swipe file and see how you can tweak them
for your own needs and market.

Work In Your Keywords in your Attention-Grabbing Blog Titles

Last but not least, don’t forget to work
your keywords into the title. I tend to do this last. Always write for your
readers first and then work in what you need to do to make sure the search
engines recognize what your content is about.

Ranking well for something your readers
don’t want to read or don’t want to click on doesn’t do you much good. Focus on
your audience and then optimize for search as an afterthought and you’ll do
well.

Implement these tips and get a few blog
posts out there. Pay attention to what’s working and what isn’t. Each market,
each blog, and each readership is different. Use these tips as guidelines to
help you find your own style that resonates well with your audience and gets
you the results you want.

Hey, come and check out our Facebook page and give us a like! We love to know what people are looking to learn in WordPress world! Our group, The Bloggers Bistro is filled with an amazing group of Female Entrepreneurs learning how to blog to promote their business, their passions and their voices!

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What is an SSL Certificate and why do you need one?

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“SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and, in short, it’s the standard technology for keeping an internet connection secure and safeguarding any sensitive data that is being sent between two systems, preventing criminals from reading and modifying any information transferred, including potential personal details.” 

So, now that we have that latin all figured out, let’s talk about this a little more.  

Back in the Fall of 2018, Google decided, in order to help with the privacy and security of websites, it was going to “require” all websites to have an SSL certificate.  This is a certificate that proves that your site is more secure.  It means that it is harder (not impossible) for bots to capture your private information, and that of your subscribers on your site.  

But you may be saying “I don’t capture anyone’s info” – well, in actual fact you do.  YOUR site captures information about YOU – your log in, your email, your name.  These are all things that hackers can use to get information from other sites. 

So, how do you get an SSL – simple, contact your hosting company. If you are with Siteground, then your SSL is included in your price. Other hosting companies can charge you upwards of $70+USD to have your site SSL’d.

The other thing, once your site is SSL’d you won’t get that pesky “UNSECURED” warning from GOOGLE, and having one will help your SERP and help Google to rank you higher.

So, basically – RUN, don’t walk to get your SSL on your site set up!

Hey, come and check out our Facebook page and give us a like! We love to know what people are looking to learn in WordPress world! Our group, The Bloggers Bistro is filled with an amazing group of Female Entrepreneurs learning how to blog to promote their business, their passions and their voices!

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The Future of SEO and Blogging

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If Google’s devastating Panda and Penguin
updates taught the internet anything, it’s that content creators can’t rest on
their laurels and hope to keep relying on the same SEO techniques forever.

Google is constantly updating, improving
and tweaking its algorithms to make its search tool smarter and more effective
at matching search terms with the right results. If you don’t adapt and evolve
with those changes, then you’ll be left behind!

The best SEO strategies then need to involve
an element of prediction and speculation. Creators need to look at trends and
clues and use these to predict the future of search and of Google. So where
exactly is the industry heading? The answers might surprise you…

Google is Becoming too smart!

The big change is that Google is moving
away from simple search to become a much more powerful AI. This is most evident
when we look at Google Home and the Assistant packaged with Google Pixel
phones.

Google wants users to be able to talk to it and it wants to provide them
with answers without them having to open up a web page and search through the
content. More and more people will be relying on voice search and this
fundamentally changes the game: we use voice very differently from the way we
type our searches!

When typing, most of us will tend to write
the precise search term we’re looking for. For example, you might search:

“Length of a piece of string”

When asking Google by voice however, you’ll
be much more likely to use a conversational tone and that means you’ll be more
likely to ask:

“How long is a piece of string?”

How
This Changes SEO

So, what does this have to do with SEO?

Your initial impulse might be to assume
that you now need to use search terms that sound more like questions. But that
would result in some pretty awkward-sounding content.

Instead then, Google is aiming to deliver
on this ambition by changing the way it matches content. Instead of looking for
precise matches in search terms and content, it is now able to understand the
actual question and the context and use this to provide a much more relevant
result (most of the time).

This is where LSI – Latent Semantic
Indexing – becomes so important. LSI is the use of synonyms and related
language in conjunction with classic key phrases. And when used properly, this
can give Google much more context while also avoiding keyword-stuffing
practices.

Another thing that search optimization now
needs to take into account, is the role of structured data. This is content
that uses markups to tell AIs like Google what particularly content is about.
This is what lets Google show recipes, times, ratings and other key information
right at the top of the search through ‘Google Quick Results’ and the knowledge
graph.

Don’t try to second-guess Google but keep
this direction in mind when designing your own SEO strategies. Google is more
than a search engine – it is an AI.

Hey, come and check out our Facebook page and give us a like! We love to know what people are looking to learn in WordPress world! Our group, The Bloggers Bistro is filled with an amazing group of Female Entrepreneurs learning how to blog to promote their business, their passions and their voices!

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How to Build Trust for Your Website

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If you want your website to be as
successful as possible, then there are a lot of different factors that you need
to take into account. Which of these is most important all depends on who you
ask but one thing that we universally know to be highly important is ‘trust’.

Google wants to provide its users with answers. This is one of its main services and if Google can’t do it, then people will look elsewhere – such as Yahoo – to get what they’re looking for.

But in order for Google to provide answers,
it needs to know which sites it can trust. The results pages are not ‘curated’,
meaning that Google doesn’t have a team to actually check the content. And that
means that it needs to start recognizing sites that deliver popular answers in
a programmatic, algorithmic manner.

How can you make sure that this all works
for you and your site is considered one of the ‘trusted’?

The
Right Links

The first and most important way to
accomplish this is with the right links profile. You need to attract links from
sites that Google already trusts – but how do you know what sites those are?

One strategy is to look at Google’s ‘In the
News’ section. Here, Google highlights breaking stories by sharing posts from
popular news sites and sites in that niche. This is a very important tip
because in order for Google to share that content as news, it must already have a high amount of trust
for those sites – and this will rub off on you a great deal.

Another tip is when possible, to try and
get a link from a .edu or .gov domain. Google likes these sites because they
have obviously got a certain amount of credibility and by aligning yourself
with them, some of that credibility is likely to rub off on you as well!

Branding

Another useful tip is branding. Google likes brands and has shared this information openly in the past. If your site name is currently the same as your keyword – rather than a catchy company name – then you’re doing yourself a disservice. (The Purple Teacup is already taken – just letting you know)

Likewise, you should also try to get links from other big brands. Google knows brands like Coca-Cola, like the BBC and like The Verge and that means they can pass on a lot of credibility.

Check out our article on SEO and Branding here.

Degrees
of Separation

Of course it’s not exactly easy to get
links from the BBC, or from the biggest sites in your niche that Google is
featuring. So what can you do if you’re still ‘small fry’?

One answer is to think of this as a game of ‘degrees of separation’. If you can’t get a link from the BBC, then getting a link from a site that has a link from the BBC can work a great deal!

Researching
Backlinks

How do you know what links a site has pointing to it? Simple: use a backlinks tool. And this also has the advantage of allowing you to research precisely which links worked for the biggest sites in your niche… so that you can build the same ones! Check out our article on being a guest blogger – guest blogging is great for backlinks

Whatever you do, keep blogging – the more content you have the happier Google and other Search Engines are!

Looking for ways to improve your SEO? Check out our SEO Awesomeness Course – an incredible resource for categories, tags, and keywords. And join us over in the Bistro! Our free Facebook Community where all the fun bloggers hang out and tag about WordPressy stuff.

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