12 Actionable Blogging Checklist For Newbie’s

12 Actionable Blogging Checklist For Newbie’s. Let’s be honest here, we are all excited to write our first ever blog post

And it seems pretty easy, Right?

You pretty much have to Login to your admin area, hover down to the post area click on ‘New post’ and start typing.

In reality There are much more to that to run a Blog

To help you with that, Here are some checklist For Your Blog:

1. Site Load Speed

If you want to survive in the mobile search result, Make your site load very fast

Google after a long-rumored talk recently announced that they are gonna take a site loading speed as a ranking signal in Google Search result page (SERPs), especially for mobile searches.

Here are some ways to increase your website Speed

• Minimize HTTP requests
• Minify and combine files
• Use asynchronous loading for CSS and JavaScript files
• Defer JavaScript loading
• Minimize time to the first byte
• Reduce server response time
• Choose the right hosting option for your needs
• Run a compression audit and much more

2. Secure Your Blog

Most People take their Blog Security as granted

Nowadays, There are hundreds and thousands of different types of Virus and malware and thousands of various ways to infect your site, and most of them are all done by automated hacking tools

You cannot risk losing your Blog, can you?

Make sure to Install security for your Website

Some of my recommended Plugins are-

3. Backup Your Blog

What happens if your Blog suddenly breaks down or Your hosting server had a DOS Attack and much more

If you hadn’t had a backup, all your Time, energy and money go to waste

Yes, you hosting company backups your data monthly or weekly

But you can’t fully rely on them

Personally, I think BackupBuddy does the best job here

4. Navigation

Make sure to have clear and simple navigation

In that way, your reader won’t get lost and can find their way to your Post and Pages

Great navigation design improves the user and reader experience while Bad navigation system may frustrate the visitors who want to locate a specific blog post

If you use Yoast, which I most certainly hope that you are, just enable the crumbreads and that will fix the problem for that.

5. Themes

Use a simple minimalistic theme. I highly recommend to use themes like GeneratePress or Themeforest

Don’t include many combinations of bright and fancy colors.

Keep at the maximum of not more than 3 colors

6. Plugins

As we have discussed above that site loading speed is mandatory

One of the most common factors in increasing load time is because the site has too many Plugins

Too many plugins will slow your site down

You see there are many Plugins that are written poorly and make unnecessary database queries and load numerous files to the page.

Uninstall the plugins which doesn’t have much use.

To help you choose from the 42,000 plugins in the official plugin directory

7. Content

Do you know the reason why some Blog post stand out and ranks in the top while some couldn’t make it to the top 100

It all comes down to the quality of your content, how amazing they are and help the users.

Make sure that your content is super thorough, and actually answers the reader’s problem.

8. Keyword

Choose your keyword wisely

If you are just starting out, you don’t wanna go for a keyword where the big boys are at.

There are many tools to determine the keyword you are about to go for.

Some of my favorite ones are KWFinder, UberSuggest, SpyFu, SEMRush etc

9. Headline optimization

Here is the deal, There are so many blogs and articles covering on one topic that it is very hard to appeal the users to read your content

That is where the headline optimization comes in

For example, let’s say You search for a keyword “Benefits of Backlinks” and the first ranking webpage has the title “Benefits of Backlinks- Domain”

and the third-ranking site has the headline “32 Amazing Benefits Of Backlinks For SEO”.

Which one do you think will get more clicks

Obviously the second one right!

That is the Power of Headline Optimization, which leads to our next point “Rankbrain”

10. Google RankBrain

In simple terms, Google RankBrain is a machine-learning AI system that helps Google to process some of its search results.

Google has also recently announced that RankBrain is Google’s third most important ranking factor

According to Rankbrain, User dwell time and clicks are taken very seriously in ranking a page.

Let’s take the example of the Benefits of backlinks again since the title of the first ranking webpage is not optimized and not many clicks it,

Instead more people click on the third-ranking site

Google will see this as a trust factor and will drop down the first spot ranking site to second or maybe third, and lift the one which gets more clicks to the higher spot.

The Same applies to User dwell time (Bounce rate too).

Try to keep your user to your site as long as you can

High Bounce rate shows that you are not worth the ranking you get and Google will drop down your site as a dead stone

11. Images

Try to add at least one images in your Blog post

As they ” Images speak a thousand words”

But just don’t use any image, use images that will back up the points you are trying to make

Use images to proof what you are saying with data and facts

In that way, people can relate to it.

Bonus Tips: Include ALT tag, a relevant name of the image. Never forget to cite the image source from where you get it unless the image is yours.

12. Promote

Most people roll their hands and relaxed after the publish button is hit

In reality, after you publish the blog post, that is not the end

Your Job is just getting started

Even the best article, if not promoted will receive no eyeballs and add value to it.

No promotion is just as a dead article

Try to promote it as much as you can.

CONCLUSION

Obviously, these are not all the checklist for your blog. If I had to list all of them down. It would probably never end. But for now, these tips will suffice. There is no magic and rocket science involved here to make grow your Blog. Use these tips and methods on your Blog and over time, you will grow, Be patient, everything worthwhile takes time. Anyway, Are there any other things you check add in the list? Let us know in the comments.