Each and every time, we all spend much time on writing posts for our blog. Then it comes - the magic moment, when the post is finished and you are about to hit the publish button to let the world know your newest thoughts.
But wait! We want our readers to actually read that post and maybe respond to it. Let´s take a few extra moments to check the post again before publishing it.
Spell Check
Nobody is perfect and we are all making mistakes all the time. Please spend one or two extra minutes to spell-check the post you have spent so much time on writing it, before hitting the publish button. It is so easy and it makes your readers feel a lot more comfortable while reading your post.
There are several ways to spell-check your post quickly, over at lifeiscolourful.com you can find detailed hints on browser- and online tools which help you avoid grammar mistakes in your posts.
Check Your Images
Darren Rowse taught us to use images in our posts, to take them to a new level recently.
Putting images to your posts grabs more attention for it especially in the RSS feed they make your post stand out from other long long lists of pure text.
Be sure, you are tagging your images for more traffic as I recommended it an earlier part of this series.
Use the post-slug Feature
By default, if you are using an optimized permalink structure, WordPress uses the post title for creating the posts URL. Therefore this posts URL should be …/things-to-do-before-hitting-publish.html, but it´s not. I have used the post-slug feature to change it.
So this posts URL actually is …/publishing-posts.html. Why did I do that? I wanted to reduce words in the URL which are of no use for search engines. Many of these words I used as the title for this post, won´t be used by people searching for such information. This posts URL has now just 2 word instead of 6 which rises their relative value for search engines.
Link to Older Posts
As your blogs archive grows bigger with every new post you write, you will find more and more possibilites to link to some of your older posts when mentioning their topic. I have done this here in this post a few times.
Try to find these possibilities and add a few links to some of your older posts whenever possible. This will not only add some context to your post, but it might also encourage your readers to visit some more pages of your blog.
Plus, search engine spiders will follow these links and crawl your old posts again. This can help you rankings for posts which do not have many incoming links.
Some of readers might also be somewhat new to your blog. This makes a great opportunity to show them some of your popular posts from the past. Not every new reader is going through maybe hundreds of posts when he or she discovers your blog.
This article is part of my series:
The 25 best ways to increase traffic to your blog. Please read the other 24 articles and you will definitely increase your blog traffic.
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November 23rd, 2007 at 1:07 pm
Spell check and check images is a must. I used to mess that up all the time. I like the post slug feature. I wrote my own blog site so it might be a pain but I will look at doing that (another reason to use Wordpress).
I will say linking to Older Posts has been my biggest area of improvement recently. I wasn’t getting any more traffic, but I have noticed a slight increase in page views per visit. Plus, I know I like this when I visit blogs myself.
Something else I do is to check how the article looks in both IE and Firefox. I have a good share of traffic using both and sometimes there are a few things that look slightly different (if I’m using tables or something more detailed than just text).
November 23rd, 2007 at 9:57 pm
I learn something new every day. I never gave a second thought to the post slug. Thanks for the tip!
November 24th, 2007 at 12:55 am
Good point there Marco,
You just kicked my bum with the Post Slug. I have been very sluggish with this method. But now this will be standard procedure.
Thank you
November 24th, 2007 at 5:56 am
Thanks to all of you, I´m glad that it is useful for you.
November 24th, 2007 at 7:39 am
Check that any URL you publish in an article as a link will actually work for your readers by copying it and opening it in some other browser (so that it doesn’t depend on some previous cookies or something else in your system). If the URL contains a session ID, delete the session ID part of that URL.
By the way, blogs that have no date on their posts, or have a date which omits the Year, really really bug me. Something dated September could be 2, 14, 26, 38, 50, or more months old. I would like a clue so that I can make a better informed judgement as to the usefulness of the advice. Some stuff is date sensitive.
November 25th, 2007 at 6:20 am
Very good post. I think the post interlinking is very important and something I try to do as often as I can!
November 25th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
Hey Marco, this is pretty useful article and thanks for linking to my post on Spell Check.
November 25th, 2007 at 3:48 pm
I am one of those that presses publish and then sees several mistakes I did not notice 2 seconds earlier. I have the same problem wen I leave comments.
November 25th, 2007 at 8:09 pm
This is indeed a good guide for the people who publish their writings without getting it checked..
November 25th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
I had never thought of tagging my images…great idea! I’m going to try to get back later to read the rest of this series..thanks for the tips!
November 26th, 2007 at 1:38 am
Thanks to all of you.
November 26th, 2007 at 10:30 am
These are some pretty good tips. Aside from the post slug, I use them all.
One last thing people might want to do is re-read their post (it’s even better if you can read it out loud). This will give us the opportunity to double-check the grammar as well as the words that might have been changed by spell check. How often do we read a post that is incorrectly using “their”, “they’re” and “there” ?
November 26th, 2007 at 3:41 pm
Spelling check is pretty easy these days with plugins and built-ins for both IE and Firefox plus external blog editors with checkers. The real trick is grammar checking. I wish that Microsoft had borrowed Word’s grammar checker for Live Writer.
The post slug thing is kind of questionable. I’ve heard all sorts of stories about it but, like with many things Google, we really don’t know how much difference it really makes, if any at all. I think that keeping the slug the same as the article name promotes a greater degree of user friendliness though.
Another consideration is that the slug does very much affect Google Adsense context. You can use it to better guide the ads that appear.
November 27th, 2007 at 6:40 pm
Thanks for the information about the Post Slug. I’m a beginner and it’s those little things that make me realize how much there is to blogging.
November 27th, 2007 at 8:46 pm
Im terrible when it comes to spell checking :S I just don’t really think about it. I’m glad that wordpress now underlines incorrect spelling!
November 28th, 2007 at 12:53 am
WordPress does underline incorrect spelling? Cool, I didn´t know that, since I do only use the code-editor and not the WYSIWYG thing.
February 13th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Wow, this is a short yet great post. Couldn’t have said it better myself.
BTW Marco I think that’s FireFox doing the underlining