Have you ever come across a post title that startled your interest, but as soon as you got to the content you couldn’t read it? I did! And why didn’t I read the post if the title was so interesting? Because the content was too cluttered. Because no matter how valuable was the information, I simple could not pull my self to go through a labyrinth of words to find the good ideas.

When you’re offering quality information, are you willing to lose your readers because you did not organize your blog post the right way? It’s extremely important to have a better structure in each blog post, before you hit that “Publish” button, and by doing so, you will dramatically increase your blog’s readability.

What I need to find in a blog post

As I said, I often come across long, cluttered posts that annihilate the initial interest. I bet that most of them offered great insight on different matters, but, to make me read them it would have taken some of these elements to guide me:
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They say that experience is the best teacher. And it is. The only problem is that experience can be both good and bad. Some things we have to experiment for ourselves to see the results, but for the others we have so many experienced bloggers sharing so much valuable knowledge that it would be a shame not to take advantage of it. Here are some of my favorite blogging tips for this second part of the series:

From ‘Dosh Dosh’

“Every blog comment is usually permanent. It’s not just a hyperlink but a long-term representation of your brand.”

Commenting on other blogs is a bit like guest posting. You expose yourself to a new auditorium and before considering building traffic, you should think about how will that comment make you look. Have you read my post on Comments: Building Traffic or Increasing Awareness?

“Knowledge only becomes an asset when it is shared.”

Maki really did it with this one! I can swear this quote will make history. It’s pretty much self-explanatory.
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Having a successful blog is not an easy thing. It takes time, dedication, creativity, knowledge and patience. There aren’t many roads that lead to success and finding the one that’s right for you can be a daunting task. It’s obviously hard to make a name for yourself and it gets harder when you think about how easy it is to mess things up and in how many ways you can do so. Just read the following “blogging tips” to screw up and judge for yourself.
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We all love music. We love music because it makes us feel good, it relaxes us, touches our hearts and minds through lyrics and ideas found in them. But how about finding great blogging tips in some of our favorite songs’ titles?

50 Cent – “I Get Money”

Unless you’re running a personal blog with no intention of monetizing, follow 50 Cent’s advice and get money. There are many ways to monetize your blog: displaying ads, affiliate networks, link selling, review, you name it. Experiment, see which one brings “the big bucks”, but be careful if you care about your PageRank and the love of Google’s search engine.

Britney Spears – “Piece of Me”

Don’t publish a post without leaving a personal note on the subject. For your readers, your blog is who you are; it’s a piece of you. Let them see you views in everything you post.
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When launching Blogsessive, I’ve tried to put myself in your place to find the reasons for not reading a blog. Some of the answers came out fast, but for some, I had to look around the web to form a better opinion.
So, if you want me as your reader and I’m not one, it’s probably because…

I don’t like the way you write.

And no, I’m not talking about your “style”. You could be a beginner and style is developed in time. What I don’t like is all the emoticons and differences in font and color styling that you use. I really care about my eyes and forcing me to go through a jungle of styles to read your article is pretty annoying. Keep it simple: titles, subtitles, bold, italics, blockquotes and lists.
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The mirage of blogging keeps on attracting more and more people each day and with it, bloggers and online publishers hurry to launch debates on tips and best practices.

There is no secret that some of these blogging tips available on many blogs out there are written out of the desire to catch a profitable train or only to align with a publishing trend.

Some of these blogs only offer tips based on myths, without a reference or statistic background. What are these myths and my arguments against them?

Post at least once a day

This is my personal favorite. Not because posting daily would be a bad thing for your blog, but because it can’t be applied to every blogger. Posting junk only because you want to make a post every day will turn against you sooner or later. Post whenever you have something meaningful or important to say.
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I’m sure that many of you have wondered why some bloggers have thousands of subscribers, why their blogs are called “authority blogs” and why they receive constant or growing traffic. Yes, their writing skills are excellent, they provide good insight on different matters and/or they have a charming personality, but when it comes to blogging, there is one thing capable of deciding your success in only a few weeks: Consistency.

Importance of blogging consistency

Why is consistency important and how much it affects your blog? If you’re a casual blogger, writing about you math class or how your fish did 3 back-flips last evening, it probably won’t affect you too much, since your target would most likely be your classmates or close friends; but if you’re serious about maintaining an online successful blog, than constancy should be a top priority to you.
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We’ve all heard the cliché “Content is King”. And it’s true – the more quality content your site has, the more both the readers and the search engines will like you for it. However, good content only means something when it’s presented properly: you could have the best tips on how to make money to be found anywhere, but if the structure of the blog post isn’t right, then it’s just as if those killer tips weren’t even there.

Let’s start at the beginning: the crucial part of any blog post is the introductory paragraph. This should be no more than a couple of lines and should be short and snappy, summarizing the article. The purpose of the first couple of sentences is to inform the reader about the post to come, and entice him or her into reading the whole thing with promises of some juicy content.

Next comes the main content. Different points should always be separated by different paragraphs, possibly with their own sub-heading. Either these sub-headings or the first sentence of each new paragraph should be the “leader” sentence. This is somewhat akin to the introductory paragraph: it should summarize the lines to come and almost force the reader to carry on exploring the post. Like the first paragraph, the leader should be short and snappy, ideally containing a controversial phrase. Controversy sells best on the web, and a unique and intriguing leader sentence will lure your readers into continuing to read the paragraph. Example leader sentences could be: ‘I can make you rich, with little effort on your part, in seven days flat.’ or ‘For years people have wasted their money on expensive blogging platforms without realising there was a free alternative.’ The rest of the paragraph should solely be based around the leader sentence, and should embellish it until a new point needs to be made. Remember: new point, new paragraph.

In addition to all of this, you need to keep your reader interested. Break up paragraphs often to avoid big chunks of text. As the average time spent on a website is purely a matter of seconds, you need all the help you can get into persuading the reader that your blog post is worth reading. If you have lists, then always use numbers or bullet points. Never nestle or embed them, that is to say never put lists in an ordinary sentence using commas in the middle of a paragraph. In fact, always try and turn things into lists where possible. They’re easy to reference, read and find. “Top 20 Blogging Platforms” sounds much better than “An in-depth discussion of the pros and cons of several of the leading blogging platforms”. People always need to be able to easily access and digest information.

Don’t forget your summary paragraph: a short round-up of what you’ve been talking about, and if necessary a conclusion. Ideally, include RSS and further information to aid your readers. A cliff-hanger which subtly promotes your next post is another great idea.Good luck!

A guest post by Heebie.

Over the years, experience has thought bloggers how to define their online personality, writing skills and furthermore use these skills to help less-experienced bloggers evolve. This is a hand-picked collection of the best blogging tips from the world’s top bloggers.

From ‘Lorelle on WordPress’

“Bloggers love to have other bloggers link to their sites”
Lorelle looks at linking as a strategy. Not only a strategy to exchange links and increase traffic, but as a strategy to reach people and build relationships. In the long run, this strategy would bring more traffic to your blog than those shameless self-promoting comments and posts!

“Give without expectation of return”
From Lorelle’s point of view, linking or positive writing about someone / something else should be done without expecting positive feedback, comments or backlinks. Write or link only because you like that someone, or their articles and don’t ask to get the same in return. It’s not a negotiation!

From ‘Problogger’

“Prove yourself first”
Darren Rowse, the man behind Problogger.com comments on how to build a good reputation inside a network. “There’s nothing more frustrating that networking with someone who disappears a couple of weeks later”, says Darren. The best thing you can do is to prove that you’re here to stay. Be constant and contribute to the network!

“Give your best content away”
If you want to build a solid base of readers, there is nothing better than constantly providing great content. Don’t save your best posts for later, or it might be too late. “The best way [...] to convince people that you’ll write great content in future is to show them great content now”, says Darren.

From ‘Copyblogger’

“Taking time to think”
While many wish to become successful bloggers, only a few manage to do so. Why? James Chartrand has found the secret key: “we don’t take the time”. In his opinion, the best thing you can do when writing a new article is to sit down and think about every possible way to present the story, as well as taking time to find the best informational resources.

“Personal branding”
“The key to effectively building your profile is the value you provide to others and what they say in result, not what you say about yourself”, stated Brian Clark, founder of Copyblogger.

More blogging tips…

Next week, in the second part of this series, Blogsessive will bring you more high-quality blogging tips from the world’s top bloggers. Stay tuned!

You’ve finally got your WordPress blog online and your hopes up. You’re writing articles and expecting readers to drop-in soon, but time passes and nothing happens. You know your articles are a good reading, so why aren’t readers showing up? That’s because you need to improve your online visibility, your WordPress SEO score.

In my past article, Better Blog SEO Plugin, I’ve presented a tool to help you easily manage your SEO needs. Now it’s time to explain how to test the results, and if the results are not as good as expected, how to update your content and SEO accordingly.

Let’s say you’ve optimized your home page and/or post page for some keywords, but still search engines refuse to index you higher and searches for those keywords aren’t providing you with any visitors. Most probably, that’s because your content is not relevant in relationship with the provided keywords. At this time, you have 2 choices:

1. Rethink your website’s keyword list and meta tags

Scan through your posts, find the most common and relevant keywords and modify your keywords meta tag accordingly. Use these keywords in the page’s title tag and for the description try to get a small paragraph that uses in a logic and readable way the provided keywords. The closer this description comes to a text paragraph available on the page, the more relevant it will be.

2. Rebuild your most recent content around the old keywords.

This option is the most time-consuming, but if you know you’ve got a good keyword list, with good search engine results (only not for you), then it should worth the effort. Always keep in mind how much competition you have for that keyword list, and how powerful that competition is. Otherwise you’re efforts will be in vain. It’s always better to fight for 1.000 relevant results and get the most of it, that for 10.000.000 results and get none.

Once you’ve done one of the above steps, the best thing you can do is to check the results with one of the following free available online SEO tools:

DomainTools.com – The Whois tool available on this domain provides users with a SEO rating of the queried domain, as well as with a SEO browser to analyze you page from a search engine’s point of view. It also makes suggestions on the things that still need to be done to increase your SEO score.

SEOCentro.com – SEO Centro provides user with a very helpful, free online meta tag analyzer. This way you can learn more about your meta tags, their relevance and also the most popular keywords found in your blog’s content.

There are of course many more online SEO tools, but these 2 should be enough to help you find your way around your blog’s SEO.