Social Media Guide for Wattpad

Blogging, Part 3

Extras and Best Practices

There are good-looking blogs. There are also, of course, not so good-looking ones. Here are some quick ideas. There are tons of ways that you can customize a WordPress blog. I won’t go into all of them. 

Some of these ideas apply to other blogging services, so stay tuned, even if you prefer Blogger or another service.

Details, Details!

Think about how the blog in the link (yes, it’s my blog) looks. Can you find what you’re looking for? Are there interesting design elements? Of course, if some of your answers are no, that’s fine, too. I don’t mind hearing about where I can improve. 

Case in point – WordPress blogs always start out with the byline – Just another WordPress blog site. But that’s not what your site is really about, now, is it? Go to General Settings and you’ll find how to change that. 

Here’s another case in point – someone sends you a blog link. And the most recent post is from three months prior to that date. Guess what? That blog is abandoned, for all intents and purposes, no matter what the blogger says. Can it be revived? Sure it can! But until it is, it’s a ghost town, and the tumbleweeds are wafting along on the breeze. 

Poke around and look at all of the features and settings. There is a lot to do, yes. But once you’ve done it, you can end up with a really beautiful site. How long does it take? An hour for a basic blog that looks decent, more or less, with the ‘more or less’ referring to both the time estimate and the look of the blog. Remember how I mentioned images way back when? You might want to revisit some of them, and use them in your blog.

SEO, A Crash Course

Why do you care about SEO? Because you want people to find your blog. Otherwise, you’ll just be shouting out to the wilderness. You need to make your blog easier to find, and you need to rise in search engine rankings. Being on the 200th page of 400,000 pages of results is worthless. You need to be on the first three pages, preferably within the first three to five results on page one. No one can guarantee search engine placement (don’t believe anyone who claims they can; they’re lying to you), but you can do a few things in order to improve your chances and your position. 

Search Engine Optimization is a continually changing discipline but it really just boils down to a pair of related big things.

1.       Google bots, as they crawl (investigate) your site and the other trillion+ websites online, can really only read numbers and letters and special characters. They cannot read images (yet). They cannot read intention (thank God). And –

2.        Your tags, your categories and your keywords are all promises to Google. And Google (or any other search engine, such as Bing or Yahoo!  – those search engines don’t like it when you break your promises. I’ll explain. 

Let’s say your blog is about horses. Never mind that we’re talking about books; this is just an example. You fill your blog with talk of horses and everything related to them, like saddles, racing, ponies, and their place in history. And your tags and your categories (blogs use these as keywords, which will we talk about later) all are something about horses. They might be horse, horses, colt, foal, filly, horseback riding, horse racing, care and feeding of horses, etc. 

Google (and other search engines) will fall in love with you over this. Why? Because the tags and categories all promise a site about horses. And the site delivers. 

Consider, instead, a site which is ostensibly about horses – and has the exact same tags and categories as in the first example – but it’s really about cows. The word horse is never mentioned in the copy in the body of the blog (the blog posts) or it might be occasionally mentioned, but the predominant word is cow. For the search engine programs (called spiders or bots), this is a broken promise. Never mind that horses and cows are similar, or that you meant to get it right. The bot can’t read that. All it sees is promises of horses but with little to no delivery. 

Sites that keep their promises are ranked higher than sites that don’t. It’s that easy.

SEO in Practice on a Blog

Think about your tags and categories. They will likely evolve over time, but a blog about writing will probably have tags and categories something like book, author, writer, writing (yes, you have to use separate forms of the terminology), short story, drabble, etc. Then, in your blog, write about such things. Don’t just link to your Wattpad account or someplace where you might be selling your work! This was mentioned before, in part 2 of blogging, when we talked about blog topics. 

Oh and blog posts, to be optimized, should be at least 250 – 300 words long. 

True story – my Star Trek fan fiction blog existed for a few years but, for the most part, I didn’t use the term Star Trek fanfiction in my posts! Oops. I did an overhaul recently, and rectified that situation. While you, the blogger, might be bored with that sort of repetition, the bot won’t be. And your readers likely won’t be, either. After all, consider your own busy life. Your readers are just as busy, if not more. They are highly likely to not be sitting down and reading your blog for hours on end. It is far more likely that they will read one or two posts, they might surf to and skim a few more, and then that’s it for the day. 

I will write more later about SEO, particularly as it pertains to regular old websites, but most of those practices are applicable here, too. Stay tuned! 

Did this chapter help you? Did it hold your interest? Do you want to see more? Then please vote! You know the puppy wants you to. ;) What are your ideas for personalizing your blog? Share them in the comments section.