If you’re the type of person who takes pride in your website then you probably invest plenty of time into crafting great content for every page on your site. While it’s possible to write short blog posts in a matter of minutes, spending hours on a post isn’t an unrealistic commitment if you want enduring content. And yet many people who spend hours writing a post will publish it without taking a few minutes to put the finishing touches on their post.
With countless websites out there vying for the attention of web browsers it’s worth doing anything you can to get an advantage over your competition. By taking just a few minutes to improve every post you make on your WordPress site you can make it noticeably more professional.
Edit Your Writing
Many people who say they can’t write cite their inability to spell correctly. If that sounds familiar you should know that F. Scott Fitzgerald, the writer of The Great Gatsby, was famous for his poor spelling. Despite the fact that he had trouble spelling even relatively simple words he still managed to publish a book that is considered to be one of the great American novels. The trick is that the first words he wrote didn’t end up in the final book, and the first words you write don’t need to end up published to the web.
After writing something you feel proud of, the urge is to immediately publish it but if you can take the time to run it through a spell check and read what you’ve written critically, your posts will be much more professional. Both steps are important, spell check misses many problems so don’t blindly trust it and if you really don’t know how to spell a word then you may need spell check to catch your mistake.
Just five minutes of editing can fix your biggest problems and make your page look much more professional.
Add Images
It’s important to understand that a web page isn’t like a book, people don’t like pages that are just walls of text. Even people who have no problem reading books without pictures will click away from a webpage without any form of imagery. Adding images makes your page more visually interesting and if you choose the right images you can reinforce the point of your writing.
Make sure that you pick images you can actually use legally. If you have a personal blog you might get away with using something you find from a Google search but if you have a business you should definitely stick to using images that belong to you or come from royalty-free image sites. There are more than ever now with plenty of images available at little to no cost so there really is no excuse to leave your pages blank anymore.
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Tag Your Post
Imagine that a reader has read your post and would like to read more about the subject, how would they find similar posts on your page? There are a number of ways to reccomend posts to readers but the easiest is categorizing posts using tags. If you have a site for a car dealership you might have tags with names like “used cars,” “trucks,” “sales,” and so on. The tags should be relevant to the particular page and the site as a whole. You can have as many as you want but in general the less the better so you don’t end up with too many tags that only have one post.
To come up with tags take a minute to think about what the article you just wrote is about, write down some tags that are descriptive and catchy and pick the best. In the end you want to use tags that relate to topics you talk about a lot so people can easily find your writing on important topics without having to dig through everything you’ve written.
Putting In The Extra Effort
“I want you to give 110% out there!”
Everyone has heard a coach in real life or on TV say this and most people have joked about how giving 110% is physically impossible but there is real logic behind this slogan. Most of the time when people say they are done with a job what they really mean is that they’ve done the bare-minimum necessary. That may be enough to get by but if you want to stand out you need to look for areas where you can do more than your competitors.
Adding these finishing touches to your new posts is important but if you are really feeling ambitious remember that you can go back and touch-up your old posts too. If you have any popular posts that are still getting traffic then it’s worth making them looking as good as possible so they can keep generating traffic for years to come. Remember that even if it only takes you an hour to write a blog post it can live online for years or even decades, so why not take the time to make your posts shine?
