Writing a professional blog post is simple when you follow a few basic rules. First, you should load the blogging software onto your website instead of using an external blog. WordPress.org provides the best software to do so, primarily because it is supplemented by an extensive number of plug-ins. Coders Write plug-ins for WordPress.org for the same reason they create apps for your iPhone, to increase the functionality.
As to the topic(s) for your blog, it helps to create a theme related to your business. Doing so will improve the focus of your blog and help to suggest articles to write for it.
One of the main reasons to write a blog involves improving the search engine optimization (SEO) for your website (more on SEO in our future posts). Blogs provide valuable, original content, an emphasis in the Google ranking algorithm, and they establish your website as a dynamic location instead of a static one. Dynamic websites are constantly adding new pages, and each time you write an entry for your blog, you are essentially creating a new web page.
An ideal length for a blog entry runs around 300 to 400 words. 300 words represents a minimum to be taken seriously by Google’s spiders (they are constantly “crawling” the web for ranking purposes), and 400 words is a soft maximum because people don’t have a lot of time, and it is better to keep your entries concise.
Two plug-ins are essential for WordPress.org: Yoast SEO and pullquote. Yoast SEO helps you to optimize your blog entries with various SEO-related functions such as a meta description and focus keyword. It will also give you a list of optimization problems and provide a “green light” when you have sufficiently addressed them.
Pull quote lets you create a graphic illustration with whatever key quotation you wish to highlight for your entry.
Every blog entry should also contain a featured photo and three or four links to external articles within the body of the text. A great way to choose copyright-free images can be found at www.pixabay.com. This site lets you choose any keyword, and it will return a slew of possible images for you to use with your entry.
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