In this post we will discuss the characteristics of a quality blog post. Quality content is very important in blogging and SEO. You might have heard it a zillion times that CONTENT IS KING — but the big question is still unanswered: how do you write a quality post? In this post we will try to find the answer.
Quality articles can increase the readership of your blog, and you can drive plenty of search engine traffic to your blog as well. If you are a serious blogger, you should check the quality of your blog post before publishing it. A well-written article helps you in many ways: you can get voluntary backlinks from many websites if you write content that is worth linking to.
Quality content is content that is optimized for your readers as well as the search engines. Don't ever over-optimize your content for search engines, because algorithms like Google Penguin and Panda can penalize you. By over-optimizing we mean black-hat SEO tricks, hidden text, paid links, etc. These are bad SEO practices, and you may be excluded from being indexed in the search results. For writing quality content you need to take care of a few things, such as the size of the content, the niche, keywords, images, internal links and external links. Let's discuss these in detail.
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How to write quality content
Content size
Content size is measured by the number of words an article contains. It is hard to say what the ideal size of an article is, because it varies from blog to blog. Some blogs write breaking news and short information that cannot be elaborated; others write tutorials, tips and reviews, which take comparatively more words to explain everything. According to some SEO experts, an ideal blog post should be at least 400+ words, but it totally depends on the blog niche, so you need to find out what post length works for you. We aim for 400–800 word articles. Sometimes it is not possible to write even 400 words — in that case, do not repeat lines just to increase the post size. It does not look good, readers hate it, and so do the search engines.
Keyword density
Keywords are those few words around which your article revolves. You need to maintain a healthy keyword density in your article — 2–3% is considered good. You can mention these keywords anywhere in the article, but it is recommended to use most of them in the post title and the introductory paragraph. Do not over-stuff keywords in your articles; that is not considered a good SEO practice.
Language
Spelling, grammar and punctuation are very important for writing a quality article. Your online readers and search engines like content that is written in proper language. We recommend writing your articles in word-processing software with spelling and grammar check enabled, so it warns you when you make a mistake.
Images
Images are used to illustrate the article content. How many images to include depends on the nature of the article: tutorials need more images than simple articles. It also matters how optimized your images are — images without alt and title tags are useless. The image title tag explains the content to your online readers, and the alt tag explains it to the search engine robots.
Internal linking
Internal linking is another factor that helps you write a quality article. Don't make your readers search for more explanations outside your blog. Mention internal links to your old articles to explain your new articles in a better way. Internal linking is also important for SEO optimization and better ranking.
External links
External links are links referring to a website or blog outside your own. It is not recommended to include too many external links in your posts; it is not considered good for SEO, as it increases the bounce rate of your blog. If you do need to add external links to your articles, mark them with the nofollow attribute.
By following these few but very important points you can ensure the quality of your articles. To summarize it all in a few words: ideal, quality content should be user-friendly and optimized for the search engines as well.