Writing Blog Content can do wonders for your website. It can dramatically help to boost your SEO rankings making your website easier to find amongst all of the other websites on the World Wide Web. It can also provide engagement for your customers or readers to help keep them coming back to your website and to establish yourself as an expert in your particular field. But writing content is not easy and it is hard sometimes to know if it is effective so what can you do?
The SEO Training website Backlinko.com recently published an article highlighting a study they conducted of over 900 million blog posts. The intention was to look at how content format, word count and headlines corresponded with social media shares and important SEO factors like backlinks (when other pages link to pages on your site).
There’s TONS of information, guides, and articles on the web about how best to optimize your website for Google, Bing, and other Search Engines. We’re constantly consuming all of this information so that we can consistently fine-tune our own process. So, here is some of what they found:
Is Longer Better?
One of the biggest things that Backlinko found was that long-form content was much more valuable than short articles. Long-form content offered more opportunities for backlinks and it also lead to more shares on social media platforms. But you don’t want to make it too long, as content that exceeded 2,000 words produced far fewer returns so keep your content focused and jam-packed with useful information.
Links, Shares and Backlinks
Very few posts actually get shared or get back linked to. It was determined that 94% of all blog posts did not even have one external link in them. It was also determined that 1.3% of all posts generated 75% of all social shares. Backlinko found that there was also no correlation between backlinks and shares on social media.
Good Headlines Work For You
Headline writing has always been important to catch a reader’s attention. That is not new but it was found that headlines that are between 14 and 17 words created over 76% of all social media shares. It was also determined that headlines that end in a question wound up being shared more, accounting for more than 23% of all content shared.
What Type of Post Works Best
So what is the best kind of post to make for social media shares? Lists are the best, being shared over 200% more than how-to posts and infographics. For more backlinks posts that address the what or why questions will produce more results than how-to posts.
When Should I Publish My Posts?
The last question that you might have is then what is the best day of the week to publish a post? Backlinko found that any day is as good as another. The difference between days with shares and backlinks was negligible so if you have found a good day to publish your posts on, stick to it.
At Nicely Done Sites we know that creating blog content may not be the easiest thing for you to do. You may not be much of a writer or you may simply not have the time. We can help with that. By reading this you have found our own blog and we can offer a content strategy for you so that you can get your name in front of potential customers and move yourself up the SEO charts. Also don’t forget to stay tuned to our blog at Nicely Done Sites as well will detail more information about these topics in the near future.