As professional bloggers your content must be clear for your audience to read, as well as, bring value to any brands partnerships. WordPress is the most popular blogging platform influencers use. For new bloggers, all the icons and buttons in the dashboard can get overwhelming when making sure everything is done properly. Here’s a quick checklist of places to check in your WordPress dashboard before you press publish on a blog post.
1. Spelling & Grammar
A typo here or there happens to us all. For readers who are sticklers about grammar, a typo can throw them off and risk your credibility. Before you press publish, use the spell check option in WordPress. It’s an ABC with the √ underneath it. You can also sign-up for Grammarly, an on-line tool that catches common grammatical mistakes, while also catching contextual spelling errors and poor vocabulary usage.
2. Disclosures
Disclose to your readers whether you’re reviewing a product you received for free, if the post includes affiliate links or if it’s a sponsored post. For sponsored campaigns, the brand may tell you where to place to the disclosure. Otherwise, you can naturally weave it into your blog post in the first few sentences or provide it at the end of your blog post.
3. Headline
Create an attention-grabbing headline for your blog post. How to’s and tutorials are popular to generate more shares on social media.
Use the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer to run a check on whether your headline has action words to engage your audience.
4. Hashtags
A sponsored campaign may also require a hashtag in your blog post heading or disclosure. If you have a large Twitter following or you’re blogging about a trending topic, hashtags can help put eyes on your blog post.
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5. Images
Create a “pinnable” image, a featured image for Facebook as well as optimized images for your blog post. By naming an image the same as the keyword you’re targeting for SEO with alt tributes, more people will find your image and the blog post.
6. Categories and Tags
To help your readers find your blog posts, make sure your blog post is published in the correct category. You wouldn’t want a craft tutorial mixed in with a recipe or for a hot topic post to end up in “Uncategorized” territory.
Tags also help group together your popular blog post content.
7. Meta Description
The meta description is the first few sentences that will appear in a search engine search or a Facebook post – to describe your blog post.
8. Yoast SEO button
The Yoast SEO plugin is designed to make sure your blog post is optimized for readability and search engines. When your images, titles, meta descriptions, and permalinks are optimized you’ll see a green “Go” button on the Yoast plugin.
9. Scheduled post date
Many of our influencers batch write multiple blog posts to be published throughout the week or the month. Make sure you assign the proper publish date.
10. Preview
A stray piece of HTML code can affect the way a blog post looks. The image you designed or photographed may not fit into the margins of your blog’s design. Make sure you press preview to see how post will look when readers see it.
Comment below: Do you follow a check list before you press publish on a blog post? What’s your best SEO optimization tip?
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