13 Things to Consider Before Publishing A Blog Post (2023)

Writing blog posts is essential for your blog. But how do you ensure your posts are of quality?

WordPress users post around 70 million blog posts each month. That’s why writers and marketers work around the clock to rank higher in search engines. This includes the 7.5 million blogs created each day on various platforms.

So, how exactly do you write content that performs that well? Today, we’ll be exploring the basics of a blog post, the importance of SEO for your blog, and the things you need to consider before publishing a blog post.

Let’s dive right in!

What Is a Blog Post?

A blog post is a piece of informational content published on a website. Blog posts are usually in the form of long-form articles with original ideas and information.

Blog posts can be used to share knowledge, generate leads, or promote any product or service.

They are also great for storytelling and building trust with your audience. The first step in creating a successful blog post is identifying what you want to write about.

Once you’ve done that, it’s just a matter of writing it up and publishing it. However, a blog needs to feature the following:

• Informative value
• Search Engine Optimized (SEO) quality
• Readability for audiences of all kinds
• Originality and plagiarism-free text

These are some of the most common and necessary elements in a quality blog post.

13 Things You Should Consider Before Publishing a Blog Post

A blog post must feature all the crucial SEO elements to draw as much organic traffic as possible.

Therefore, for your post to rank in SERPs, the blog must feature key SEO elments which are the On-page SEO elements. To help you understand that, here are five things you need to consider before hitting the submit/publish button.

1. Keyword Research

Keywords are the central pillar of any SEO strategy. Performing keyword research is crucial and if ignored, you might end up writing a blog post that you will read alone.

This is simple because no one is searching for the topics or keywords you are writing about.

Your keywords need to have relevance in search terms. That’s why you need to have the following:

• The relevancy of your keyword
• The placement of primary and secondary keywords. Ensure that the primary keyword is in the title (heading tags) and in the introduction, while the secondary is scattered throughout the body text of your blog.
• Keyword density should be less than 2-3% of the entire text to avoid keyword stuffing. I use the Rank Math Pro plugin to monitor keyword density and usage in my posts. (You can as well try it out for free.)
• Competitor analysis. Check for the word count of ranking pages. How they used keywords in heading tags and in the body. Remember, you are looking out how they used the keywords and how you can optimize them in your blog post.

If you want to find exact targeted keywords, you can use keyword tools like SEMRush, Google Keyword Planner, and Google Trends which will give you insights on many new terms for long-tail keywords and titles. So, make sure you consider these elements before posting your blog post.

I use SEMRush to conduct keyword research for this blog. To find, longtail and low-competition keywords to drive more traffic. Try it now for FREE.

2. Draw an Outline

Outlining before writing the article is very beneficial. An outline contains the main ingredients and steps to structuring a blog post. It can help you remember the main points of blog posts you want to discuss.

Without an outline, you can skip or forget some issues that are necessary to be mentioned.

For making a perfect outline, Google the title of your blog post and check the top ranking articles.

Divide your post into sections accordingly by listing pinpoints that you feel are important to consider.

Researching and listing all the key areas will help you write effectively and quickly. A healthy outline leads to a well-informed and detailed article.

• Introduction;
• Important definitions;
• Supporting headings;
• Benefits;
• Cons;
• Working;
• Conclusion.

3. Content Readability

Content’s readability is yet another factor that’ll count in when you post it. How can you make it more readable? By ensuring it doesn’t exceed the basic requirements, such as:

• Paragraphs no longer than 3-4 sentences
• Sentences no longer than 12-16 words
• Not using jargon
• Explaining even the most complicated elements in lay terms

Remember, you’re writing for a familiar audience. Therefore, your content must be as simple and readable as possible.

4. Ensure it is Plagiarism-Free

Plagiarism will throw your blog back at the end of the line and might even stop it from ranking altogether. So, how do you deal with it?

• Find a plagiarism scanner.
• Check for plagiarism in your content.

• Locate the source of plagiarism, i.e., the original website and author
• Remove plagiarism by rephrasing or rewriting duplicated content
• Cite the source
• Done

This will help you ensure that there’s no duplicity in your text and make it ideal for SEO. You can use the detailed report as proof of quality work to attach to your work.

Moreover, the report will also mention the extent of plagiarism in each sentence so you can improve them accordingly.

Hence, you should always check for plagiarism in a blog post before posting.

5. Check for Grammatical and Spelling Errors

Grammatical and spelling errors can ruin your whole blog post. Hence, the removal of errors and omissions is essential.

First, write the blog post carefully, and try to avoid making any mistakes. Grammatical mistakes can be inappropriate use of parts of speech, forms of the verb, irregular usage of adjectives, adverbs, and punctuation errors.

After writing, it is obligatory to proofread the blog for grammatical and spelling errors. As humans, we make a lot of mistakes. You can also get help from a grammar check online or some physical guide to detect and eliminate mistakes in your content.

• Wrong forms of the verb;
• Punctuation errors;
• Subject and object confusion;
• Spelling mistakes;
• Non-contextual words.

Also check out: The Best SEO Content Writing Tools I Recommend

6. On-Page SEO Elements (Backlinks, Heading Tags, Metadata)

On-Page SEO elements will play a vital role, so you must remember them. But what exactly do you need to tend to?

• Use H1 as your title and H2 as your subheadings
• Add metadata, i.e., meta title and description
• Acquire and add quality backlinks
• Image and video optimization

While writing the meta description, ensure it is at most 150 characters. A lengthy meta-description may exceed the visible area under search results.

This will help the search engine crawler read your content more easily and allow it to understand the informative value of your text. 

7. Proper Structure (80/20)

Blogs are a marketing element; there’s no denying that. However, the marketing element in your blog needs to be subtle, and you cannot force your way through it. So, you need to follow the golden 80/20 rule, which is:

• 80% informative value
• 20% or less marketing or promotion

The 80% allows you to establish your brand or business as a viable option in a blog post. The other 20% is where your user will naturally be convinced about your marketing requirements.

While writing the structure, add necessary breaks to your content. Each paragraph should be at most 5 lines, and each sentence should contain at most 20 words.

Using tools like a word counter can help you easily count words in your blog post.. Try the Workaguide Word Counter. Easy to use and Accurate.

Readability is a significant concern when you are writing marketing content. If the content is challenging to read, the user may leave the website, ultimately increasing the dwell time of your webpage.

8. Add Infographics

Infographics and statistical data representation are very helpful in making the content attractive to the reader. Users like to see the stats in graphs or pictures instead of text.

It is proven that images and visually represented data are more likely to be understood by the human brain as the attention span of humans is decreasing rapidly.

Enlisting benefits and disadvantages in the form of bullets in an image can be a great way to represent them effectively. Please make sure not to use flashy colors in photos, make them highly visible, and ensure high picture quality.

• Bar graphs;
• Pie charts;
• Bullet points;
• Topical representation.

9. Add Videos

A video in your blog post is also essential for SEO and infographics. Videos add authenticity to your blog post. Make sure to add at least one video to your blog post, which should be highly relevant and informative. Also, do care of copyrights while using any video.

The best practice in blogging is to re-purpose and reproduce your content in multiple formats. Create a written blog post, record a podcast, or create a YouTube video for a single piece of content. This can increase your chances of ranking for the post, the video, and social media for the same post, which is a win for you.

• You can use videos that you make yourself for your YouTube and social media channels;
• Only use videos that are creative commons in your blog post;
• Always embed, never upload;
• Check the relevancy first.

10. Images & Videos

You should optimize your images and video before posting a blog post because the high resolution and bigger files can increase your web page load time.

Therefore, you can use plugins like; WP Rocket which automatically lazy loads and optimizes images on your site, Lite speed, and Tiny PNG to compress your images.

Secondly, for videos, do embed them instead of uploading them because uploading a video to your blog post can affect your website speed significantly.

Pictures and video are vital in terms of SEO and user experience, but optimize them before posting.

• Covert the images to WEBp format;
• Embed video instead of uploading;
• Use compressing plugins.

11. Link Your Content Internally

Internal links are references to other blogs posted on the same website. Internal linking is essential before publishing an article.

A good, internally linked website tends to rank higher in SERP. Internal linking guides the crawler and user to navigate multiple relevant pages of your website.

While writing on a topic, do add internal links to your published article that can be helpful for users if they visit. This can be done by marking the relevant words or phrases as hyperlinks—both the Google spider and the users like blogs with useful internal links.

• 2-3 internal links;
• Links should be Highly relevant;
• Proper positioning of the anchor text;
• Relevant and natural anchor text.

12. Add External Links

External links are equally important in the better performance of a blog post. A blog post should have external links along with internal ones. Internal links are references to other blogs on the same website.

In contrast, external links are references to other websites’ blog posts. If you used any information from another website, you should add an external link to that website page in your blog post. Make sure not to add excessive external links.

• 2-3 external links are enough;
• The external link should be highly relevant;
• The linked website should not be spammy;
• The linked website should match your niche.  

13. Proofread

Never skip proofreading. As humans, we are meant to make mistakes; there are always chances of misspelled words and grammatical errors, which can be eliminated by proofreading.

You can take help from a friend or an English teacher in proofreading your blog post. It will also help to enhance your sentence structure.

After proofreading several times, correct the mistakes if found any.

• Proofread several times;
• Take assistance from a friend or teacher;
• Correct the mistakes, if any.

Conclusion

You need to consider these key things before publishing your blog post. Make sure it’s plagiarism-free and that you have optimized your post well to rank in Search engines. Be sure to use this post as a checklist before posting a blog post.

We hope this article was informative for you to improve blog post publications.