This post is coming a little late due to lack of time and also because I believe it will be more relevant to our course this week rather than last weeks introductory lessons on blogging.

While other parts of your blog are vital to its success as I have mentioned many times before, but posts are what make your blog stand out. It’s where we show who we are and what we’re trying to convey. Here, I’ve compiled a list of several key elements that make up a good post.

The Title

Post titles are extremely important for several reasons. One, they can attract visitors, and two, they can attract search engines. Post titles carry more weight when it comes to search engine rankings meaning a search engine such as Google finds titles more important than normal text. Therefore, if you create a title that has specific keywords that you want to target, search engines will pick them up quickly and help your rankings.

There has been some debate lately over whether to write post titles for search engines or for humans. In plain English this means should I make my post title attractive for my readers or should I style my title and keyword it heavily so that search engines will pick it up? More and more bloggers are writing for search engines and leaving their readers to titles that may not hook the readers as they should. So the question is what do I do?

Do I write for search engines or humans?

In my opinion, as well as in the opinion of many other bloggers, it is best to have an even distribution of posts targeting these two different areas. In my own blog I apply this technique and you will notice that some of my posts are keyworded very heavily such as Choosing a Niche and Choosing a Blogging Platform. You can see in that post I am targeting the keywords “blogging platform”, “niche”, and “choosing”. In my other posts such as the Extreme Designs of the Week series,  search engines will not send me many hits from these keywords as they are very general and irrelevant which is why I’m appealing these posts completely to users and disregarding search engines completely.

Date, Author, and Category

Dates: One of my favorite and well known bloggers, Darren Rowse from Problogger, and he’s always had this thing for dates saying how they down-tune your posts and force them into a position where they are considered outdated and irrelevant by users while in fact the posts contain very exquisite and knowledgeable information. He has considered removing dates from his posts and from my perspective, for him it is a good idea. For me, it is not.

Let me explain why.

Darren has three years worth of archives and when users visit his blog, they don’t want to see those posts because they are considered outdated. So in order to battle this epidemic, Darren is working on not including dates in his posts.

In my posts, I not only include the date, but I position it in such a way that you probably won’t miss it. I didn’t do this on purpose, my design just ended up this way, and it looked good. Right now, for my blog, dates are not a pain because the farthest they go back is to March 2008 which is not too far back. I suspect when I have my one year anniversary, I will make some changes in order to prevent the same thing from happening to my posts as they did to Darrens.

Author: It is good to include the author of the posts because it gives credibility to the post and a sense of authority behind the text. If you have more than one author on your blog, this is a definite must have.

Categories: Include a category in your post somewhere. This is there purely to orient the reader. In my reference to post titles above, if you don’t have a relevant title, the category will tell the reader where your post is going.

Comments

Comment links may be both distracting and engaging. If you (and me) have posts with “0 Comments” when you’re just starting your blog, it may be distracting for readers and if they wanted to comment on your post, that 0 may turn them off. If nobody else is saying anything why should I right? Just the opposite, if you have a post with “20 Comments”, this intrigues visitors to comment simply because there’s a great discussion going on.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking icons/links/plugins are all very essential to be in a post. The ‘Share This’ plugin I recommended in my earlier post Make Your Blog Busy By Busying It with Plugins is great at handling this because it covers virtually every bookmarking or sharing site on the Internet and it is small and easy to implement into your posts.

Headings

Headings are also very great. Using <h2> or <h3> tags can help break up your blog post and keep readers focused. Remember, people don’t read posts, they scan them. Headings are great for search engines, readers, and you can make your posts look more than paragraphs and paragraphs of text.

Images

Posts with images generate a lot more attention than those without. Why? Because we love images. An attractive image will yield more hits and views than anything. If you noticed, I try to include a lot of images in my posts and everyone else should as well. Including small thumbnails in long posts (just like in this one is also great because it breaks the post down even further than headings.

The <!–More–> Tag

Some bloggers like to use the <!–more–> tag which basically cuts off the post at a specific location and makes readers click on a link to read on. This is great for posts where you want to build up curiosity of your readers and works well. Myself, I do not use this tag because I hate clicking the “Read more” link because it distracts me from the main posts page. I like it all in one big list. But, the <!–more–> tag can be very engaging because it creates more focus and attention on individual posts and when your readers are on that page, why not comment right?

There is much more in depth discussion on posts, content, and these next several posts will be here to cover it all.

Side Note: Don’t trust your Wordpress Auto-Save feature. I learned that one from experience. (Had to rewrite almost half the post because my browser crashed)

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