Blogging is a great way to always have fresh and interesting content on your website, which can help from an SEO perspective and encourage sharing and engagement from your customers. Here at Imagebox, we use WordPress to do our blogging. We love WordPress because it is simple enough for all of our clients to understand, but it still offers all of the tools that we need to build both great websites and great blogs.

But what do those blog posts you’re reading on our clients’ sites look like from the back end? Here is an inside look at the making of a blog post:

1. Title: Your title is the first thing that will catch a reader’s attention, so be sure to make it good! A good way to come up with a catchy title is to browse a newspaper to get a better understanding of headline structure. Short, catchy, and to the point is the way to go. Remember to be consistent when it comes to the capitalization of your titles, too. Decide whether you will capitalize just the first letter of the title or the first letter in each word of the
2. Body: Here is where you tell the people what they need to hear! There is no “right” length for a blog post, but you should aim to keep it long enough to serve a purpose and short enough to not lose your readers. It’s also very important, as it is in your blog post title, to include keywords throughout your content, especially in the first paragraph.
3. Categories: Categories allow you to generally group your blog posts into appropriate topics. For instance, if you had an auto blog and were writing a blog post about a 2014 Mustang, you might use the category “Cars” to generalize what the post is about. Then, anyone who comes to your blog and only wants to read articles on cars can simply sort by that category.
4. Tags: To get more detailed, you add tags to your blog posts. In the above example, you might want to use tags like “2014 Mustang, “Mustang,” and other topics mentioned within the article. Tags can help readers search for you.
5. Images: Images make a great addition to your blog posts, especially when they are your own photography and not stock photos. It’s simple to add in an image from your computer or a link on the web. If you have multiple images, you can set a featured image, which will appear as the thumbnail when you post your blog in places such as on Facebook.
6. Meta Description: We use an SEO plug in called Yoast, which allows you to write your own Meta Description and SEO Title. You blog post’s meta description is a 155-character explanation of the page that will show up in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). While the content of your meta description doesn’t actually affect your SERP ranking, this is the one or two sentences that will convince someone to click on your link.
7. SEO title: Your SEO title tells readers and search engines what your page is about. This is the title that will show up in search results and be the active link that readers will click on to go to your blog. This is also what will show up as the title in your browser tab.
8. Author: If multiple people in your business blog (like the entire Imagebox team does) you can choose the author of your post so that the individual writer can get credit. You can even view blog posts by author to see what one specific author is up to.

Once you know the basics of a blog post, it gets much easier to start posting. So sit down, make up an editorial calendar to get yourself on track, and blog away!