Blog writing can be used for so many different purposes… an expression of yourself, like a diary; an expression of your experiences, like a travel journal; or an expression of your brand, your business goals, to build a connection with your customers. One thing is for sure, it’s a very important and useful tool in improving your reach. Having meaningful, relevant content improves your rankings and helps get you noticed online. Here are some key things to remember whenever you’re writing, to make sure you maximise your reach no matter the topic. My top 5 tips for better blogging:

1.  MAKE SURE YOUR POST IS AT LEAST 300 WORDS.

This is a simple, easy-to-achieve starting point to make sure your rankings don’t get penalised in search results. Hitting the minimum at least for post length is mission critical. If your posts are too short, you can look like you’re just trying to create loads of links to your website… this is a big no-no for search engines.

2.  PRODUCE MEANINGFUL AND USEFUL CONTENT.

To give your posts the best chance of being noticed, read, and shared, you need to make sure what you’re writing is relevant. Search engines have great algorithms these days that can skim your posts and can kind of tell if you’re writing rubbish, or nonsense just to increase links to your website. Conversely, search engines love it when your posts tell a story or have some meaning.

3.  DON’T “KEYWORD STUFF”.

Back in the day search engines used to skim your site for keywords, and your site would rank based on the presence of those keywords. So people started “keyword stuffing” – loading up their blog posts and pages with important keywords, repeated over and over, with no meaningful content. This worked for a while, then Google got wise to it, and naturally their algorithms got smarter. Now they don’t just look for keywords, they can tell if they’re excessive, and your page will suffer – the rankings get penalised.

4.  PAY ATTENTION TO OPTIMISATION.

Use the tools provided in your CMS or blog-posting site to optimise each and every post. Add tags, important keywords to your meta descriptions, useful preview text, whatever you can with the tools available. They’re usually pretty simple, but often overlooked.

5.  SHARE YOUR WORK.

Every time you publish a new post, share it. Share your work on your social media channels, link back to the blog post itself, share it on relevant forums, get friends and affiliates to share it. Having your content linked from other places on the internet helps search engines notice it as relevant and popular.

The key takeaway here that ticks all of these boxes is to just write naturally. Write as if you’re telling a story, let it flow like conversation. And then share! Share away, get those links out there, and people reading your meaningful content. Search engines will love you for it, and so will your customers.