When you look deeper into the anatomy of writing an effective blog post, you will find that there is more than just words that make your blog post an effective blog post.
Writing an effective blog post for the human visitor and the Search Engines is far from rocket science, but at the same time, there is a pattern you should follow. Here are the SEO-Alien's 8 parts to writing better, more engaging blog posts that will help the human visitor as well as the Search Engines.
1) Give Your Article an Awesome, Keyword Rich Title!
The Title: There is no doubt that the Search Engines are going to "look" at the Title of your article as the main source for indexing. In other words, make sure your Title is or contains the majority of the search phrase your want people to use when they search for an article like yours.
2) Add a Catchy Picture!
A picture in a blog post is a good way to break up a mass of text and all effective blog posts will have at least one. It is even more important today with image sharing sites like Pinterest gaining widespread popularity. This way, by sharing that article image on Pinterest and if it is catchy enough, you may get ten's, hundreds or even thousands of people sharing that image… and where does that image link back to? Your Blog post of course!
Don't just grab any image from Google though, you will want to check the copyrights of your picture. To make it even easier to add the perfect picture without risk of copyright infringement you can create your own or there are several online sources that provide thousands of stock photos that you can use for your website or blog. You can search for free images or use high quality picture resources like istockphoto.com and/or Fotolia.
3) Create a Hooking and Visually Powerful Introduction!
Your Introduction: The introduction to your article is very often the fist thing people will see. It should be interesting enough to make people want to read the rest of the story.
Another important part of writing an effective blog post is to be sure it is optimized for both the human visitor and the Search Engines. A simple way to enhance the visual effect of your article and to assist the Search Engines is to use h2 to h4 tags for the introduction text. This will give it more emphasis over the rest of the article. Also, using the h4's and the h2's in your blog post introductions will provide your article much more SEO Juice. Google and other Search Engines will give that text within your h2 to h4 text more "SEO" value. So be sure that your headline is keyword and/or keyphrase rich as well.
Do not overwrite your introduction though, a punchy intro is more effective.
4) Create a Catchy Lead In!
After your intro, segue into your main points. If you are doing a list style post, use a line like "The main points are…" rather than just putting a bulleted list directly after your intro.
5) Your Main Points
Deliver your main points that you want to make. You can use a bulleted list to break them down, or use headings over paragraphs. For this part of your blog post, write for your reader, not for the Search Engines.
6) Conclusion
A blog post isn't a college essay. You don't have to reiterate all of your points again, but a closing paragraph does wrap up your post and doesn't leave readers hanging.
7) Invitation for Feedback
The comments section of your blog is a great way to build a community. Make sure you leave a line at the end of you post to encourage people to engage. Something as simple as "What do you think?" can work.
8) Related Posts, Comments and Sharing
Use plugins (or maybe your blog theme already offers it), to share related posts. Two plugins you can use for both comments and related posts is the "Disqus Comment System" and the "Yet Another Related Posts Plugin".
The Anatomy of a Blog Post
So there you have it, the SEO-Alien's 8 steps to writing an effective blog post for both the human and the Search Engine.
About the Author:
The SEO-Alien is a project started in 2009 regarding all things online marketing. The site started out more of a diary of predictions, suggestions and references to things I frequently used for online marketing... before social media marketing was even an option.
I hope you find the information and tools presented here useful and something worth sharing with others.
If there is anything else about online marketing or any online advertising strategy you think would be helpful, please let me know.
