As we mentioned earlier, search engines and users love longer and comprehensive articles that provide all the information they need.
Now the problem is that humans have a short attention span.
A slight difficulty in reading or understanding will put off your users, and they will leave without looking at all the useful information that you offered.
To solve this problem before it happens, you need to make all your content easy to read.
A good place to start would be to present your article in bite-size sentences using a friendly tone and lots of visuals.
Following are just some basic tips to make your content more readable and user-friendly.
- Use smaller sentences and paragraphs. This leaves a lot of white space around text making it easier to look and read.
- Try to improvr typography by using more readable fonts, large font-size, and plenty of line spacing.
- Check the readability score of your content. Yoast SEO comes with a built-in tool for that, you can also find tons of other online readability checkers
- Use a grammar checker. We recommend using Grammarly, it not only checks grammar but actually helps you write better.
- Use images, screenshots, videos, infographics, and other visual elements. These media elements make your article highly-engaging and easier to read.
6.Learn and apply the SEO basics to your Website
SEO is a set of best practices that help you make your website more search engine friendly. You don’t need to be an ‘SEO Guru’ to improve When users find your content in search results or RSS feeds, the first thing they see is your article headline.
A catchy blog post title stands out and gets more clicks. Whereas a plain and boring headline gets ignored, and users are likely to scroll by it.
This makes headlines very important.
You need to learn how to write better titles for your blog posts that capture user attention and get more clicks.
Luckily, blogging experts have been doing research on headlines for a very long time, and you can benefit from their findings.
These are the basic building blocks of an effective headline:
- A good headline triggers an emotional response (joy, surprise, shock, curiosity, fear, excitement, greed, and so on).
- It offers users a reward and value
- It promotes the content by including target keywords
7.Learn to Write Great Headlines
When users find your content in search results or RSS feeds, the first thing they see is your article headline.
A catchy blog post title stands out and gets more clicks. Whereas a plain and boring headline gets ignored, and users are likely to scroll by it.
This makes headlines very important.
You need to learn how to write better titles for your blog posts that capture user attention and get more clicks.
Luckily, blogging experts have been doing research on headlines for a very long time, and you can benefit from their findings.
These are the basic building blocks of an effective headline:
- A good headline triggers an emotional response (joy, surprise, shock, curiosity, fear, excitement, greed, and so on).
- It offers users a reward and value
- It promotes the content by including target keywords
Copywriters usepower words to trigger emotional responses. They tell users why the article is valuable or what they will get from clicking on the headline.
Lastly, a good headline includes a call to action for users which is often subtle and sometimes implied.
To learn more, we recommend you to check out these headline that went viral and what you can learn from them.
You can also use the following free headline analyzer tools to help create better headlines:
Our team regularly uses these three tools to create better blog post titles and headlines.
8. Make Internal Linking a Routine Task
Now that you have started creating good content, it is important to link to your articles from your existing blog posts. This is called internal linking, and it plays a huge role in SEO.
Here is why internal linking is so important:
- Internal links help Google understand the context and relationship between different articles on your website. It then uses this information as ranking signals.
- Internal links, when placed strategically and in context, can help you increase page views and reduce bounce rate.
- It is harder to ask third-party websites to link to your articles. It is way easier to create links on your own site.
We recommend making it a habit to link to your older articles from your new articles.
Because internal links play such an important role in SEO, we have even made it part of our pre-publish checklist for our writers.
9.Start Generating More Backlinks
backlink is an incoming link to your content from an external website. Backlinks are one of the most influential signals in Google’s rankings.
Getting backlinks from reputable websites and blogs is very difficult. Not just for beginners, even experienced bloggers struggle with it.
Here are some tips to get quality backlinks to your website:
- Reach out to influencers and reputable blogs in your industry, and then tell them about specific content on your website that they might want to link.
- Write guest posts on other blogs and websites.
- Interview influencers and bloggers on your blog. They will likely want to let their users know to come checkout their interview, and you’ll get a backlink.
- The easiest way to get a backlink is to add a link to your website on all your social media profiles.
10.Add Images, Charts, Infographs to Create Visually Attractive Content
In step 5, we mentioned that adding images and charts to your articles makes it more readable.
Since visual elements are so important, we believe they deserved their own spot on this list.
As human beings, our brain prefers visual elements. We love colors and objects because aesthetics trigger emotional responses in our brains. This makes us more engaged and immersed in our surroundings.
People love looking at infographics because they make information engaging and easy to consume.
Images in your blog posts grab user’s attention and help them focus on not just the visual element but also the text around it.
If you’re just starting out, then it’s important to know that you cannot just use any image you see on the internet. Images are protected by copyright and stealing copyrighted material can have serious consequences.
Ideally, you want to use your own images, graphics, and photographs, but not all bloggers are graphic designers or photographers.
Luckily, there are so many great resources to find royalty free images, and there are even tools that you can use to easily create your own graphics. Here are some helpful resources:
Canva
Pisart
Inshort
Add pic
Snap
11.Add Videos to Your Articles
Videos are the most successful form of content on the internet. Users spend more time on blog posts containing videos than just text and images.
Adding videos to your articles in WordPress is super easy. However, you should naver uoload videos to wordpress because it is not optimized to stream videos.
A video hosted on your WordPress hosting server will take up too many resources, and the user experience would be terrible.
The best way to add videos to your WordPress site is by uploading them to YouTube and then embedding them in your blog posts.
This gives you even more exposure as YouTube itself is the world’s second largest search engine, and a popular social media platform.
There are many ways to easily create video content for your website. Here are a few that you can start with:
- You can create slideshows of how to tutorials with voice over instructions
- You can create screencasts
- Record interviews with other bloggers and influencers in your industry
- Become a vlogger by adding your own videos shot in selfie mode
For video editing, if you are using Mac, then iMovie is perfectly capable of performing basic video edits. Windows users can use free video editing software like Lightworks or shotcut for basic editing.
12.Utilize User-Generated Content
User-generated content is basically any content generated on your website as a result of user activity. This includes comments, testimonials, guest posts, user reviews, and more.
User-generated content helps you bring more traffic to your website because it gives users multiple opportunities to participate and get involved.
Users are more likely to return, share, and even purchase from your website when they spend more time on it.
There are many different kinds of user-generated content that you can add. You need to choose what works best for your blog and start from there.
For more ideas, see our guide on how to use user generated cintent grow your website.
13. Keep Your Website Design Clean and Clutter Free
There are a lot of great WordPress themes available on the market. The problem is that many beginners want to use a theme with all the bells and whistles. These themes are not always the perfect design for your website.
Bad website design stops your users from spending more time on your blog which decreases your pageviews.
Whereas a good design helps them discover more content, explore different sections, and spend more time.
We are often asked by users how to choose the best theme? Our answer is to always strive for simplicity.
A simple, clean, and functional theme makes a good first impression and offers the best user experience.
If you are looking for some theme recommendations, then check out our expert-pick showcases:
14.Optimize Website Speed to Load Your Pages Faster
In this era of instant gratification, no one wants to wait for a website to load. If your website is slow, then users will simply leave your website before it even loads.
Search engines like Google also consider website speed and page load time as one of the important ranking factors.
To make sure that your website loads fast, you need to optimize your WordPress performance. This means you need to use caching, avoid unnecessary bloat, and optimize your images.
We have prepared a step by step WordPress performance optimization guide that will help you speed up your website without hiring a developer.
15. Start Your Email List Right Away
Most beginners spend too much of their time bringing new users to their website. However, more than 70% of users leaving your website will never return.
The trick to growing your blog traffic is NOT to just get new visitors, but you also need to keep existing visitors coming back.
How do you make sure that users return to your website?
You do that by asking them to subscribe to your blog.
Users can subscribe to your website’s social media profiles. However, most social networks limit your reach, and your users can only see some of your content.
This is why you need to start building your email list.
The best thing about your email list is that you own it. No one can limit your reach, and you get direct access to your user’s inboxes.
Email marketing is the most cost-efficient and highly effective marketing tool at your disposal.
You are losing potential subscribers each day without an email list.
For more on this topic, please read our article on why building an email list is so important.
Once you have an email list, you can send regular email newsletters to bring more visitors to your blog.
We recommend using Constant Contact sending blue or convert
Here’s our step by step guide on how to create an email newsletter
16. Automatically Share Your Blog Posts
When we stress that you should build an email list, we don’t mean that you should stop building a social media following.
Quite the opposite, in fact, we want you to continue building a social media following on all the important social platforms, and even find new niche platforms that you can explore.
The problem with social media websites is that you have to regularly post content to keep your profiles active and drive traffic to your blog.
If you do that manually, then you’ll soon be spending quite a lot of time on sharing content.
This is where IFTTT comes in. It is a free online service that allows you to automatically share your WordPress blog posts on social media websites.
17. Regularly Share Your Old Articles on Social Media
If you’re like most blogs, you probably only publish one article a day, this means for the rest of the day, there is no update from you on social media.
On platforms like Twitter, your Tweet will soon disappear, and your users will probably not even see it.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could automatically share your old content at regular intervals throughout the day?
This will help you get more traffic from social media by increasing your visibility and keeping your profiles more active.
Luckily, you can automate it with tools like Buffer and Revive Old Posts.
With Buffer, you will have to bulk-upload your updates manually. On the other hand, Revive Old Posts will allow you to automatically share your own old articles.