How To Make A Blog Post (And Your Blog) Look Good

This week I wanted to concentrate on the aesthetics of your blogs and their presentation along with a little search engine optimization. We have been reading about all this in text and this week we can incorporate what we have been reading about.

This week you guys will write one blog post and spend more time doing the following.

1) Include 1 or 2 pictures in every blog post you have written so far. I want you to switch around between left aligned, right aligned and centered.  How to use images

2) Edit the ALT tags of your photos and I want to see a caption on your photos when I hover over them.  The reason for this is that search engines cannot read photos.  The alt tags tell the search engine what pictures are on your page.

3) I want everyone to pick one or two keywords or keyword phrases for their blog.  These are going to be words that you want your blog to come up for when people search for them in the search engine.  If my blog is about find the best pizza in Boca Raton then my target keywords could be:

a) Boca Raton pizza

b) South Florida pizza

c) Best pizza Boca Raton

d) “Where can I get a good pizza in Boca Raton”

There is not limit really to how many keywords you target although you generally would want to stick to less than 5 for one page.  Most websites owners only target about 1 to 3 primary keywords across their website and then a bunch of ancillary or geo keywords. Every website is different.  Play around with your keywords and search for them in different search engines. Are the keywords competitive? Why are the keywords coming up for certain websites?  Have those website worked them into their URL’s?  Are they writing pages or posts that have the keyword loaded into them?  Try to get a feel for the competitiveness of the keyword and try to pick a keyword or two that you think you could get ranked on.

When you have those keywords picked out I want you to go back and include them into each post at least twice.  They may already be there or you might have to be creative to work them in. I want you to bold the keywords and maybe even change the font color to highlight your keywords. Those keywords should be worked into your Alt tags and the titles of your posts also!

4) I want you to link to two of your other posts.  I want you to incorporate a keyword as anchor text  and reference back to something you wrote about.  If you have long link to other posts I want you to condense them down using anchor text as well.

5) Make sure the font in your blogs is consistent across all posts.  Play with your fonts and font size to make the text look good. 

6) Break up your posts into paragraphs.  People do not want to read large paragraphs of text.  Keep your paragraphs short and sweet and include visual elements as much as possible.

7) Read the following and incorporate what you can:

http://diaryofamadfreelancer.com/5-ways-blogger-blog/

http://thecreativemoose.blogspot.com/2014/01/good-typography-gets-90-of-job-done.html

 I am going to be grading your blogs this week as follows:

10 points for your blog post.

10 points for aesthetics for your entire blog. (How well you incorporated everything from this post.)

To do this week:

1) Read Chapter 8

2) Take Chapter 8 quiz

3) Write one blog post

4) Do blog project instructions posted above

5) Finish your Hootsuite project that I gave you last week..

6) Submit your 1 blog post this week to safe assign.
7) Post about your blog on Twitter, your Facebook business page you created, and Google Plus.
8) When you submit your blog post to safe assign in blackboard, in the comments section I need the following so I can grade easily:
a) blog URL
b) Facebook URL
c) Google Plus URL
d) Twitter URL