Need a few practical tips to improving your blog? Look no further.

Make Your Introductions Short

Too many blogs, and other written online content, have lengthy introductions. You barely need three sentences. If you have a 500 word post and your introduction is one third of that, you have a serious problem.

If it helps, do you introduction last. Don’t spend a lot of time thinking of a clever hook or whatever. Write the main body first. This will inform how you should write an introduction.

Edit

Yes, actually. Don’t write stuff and slap it up there. Edit it properly. Generally, this means more than a copyedit (that is, an edit for spelling, grammar, style, etc.). You want to think hard about the tone of your words, whether the post will speak to you audience, what you want it to accomplish, and whether it’s doing what you want it to do.

If necessary, don’t look at your writing for a few days after you finish writing. Edit with a bit of distance and it will be easier.

Cut 10% of Your Words

A big reason to edit is there are probably words, sentences, and maybe even entire paragraphs in your copy that aren’t necessary. Back in university, your professors insisted on word limits. It’s not that you can’t write more than 2,000 words on the foreign policy objectives of Lester B. Pearson. It’s that when you cut your work down to 2,000 words, you make sure you’re including just the essentials.

Since this is the Internet and there’s no reason to enforce an arbitrary word count on your blog posts, adopting a rule of thumb about cutting 10% of your blog is one way to achieve the objective of refining your work and ensuring that every word is necessary.

Don’t Forgo Internal Links

Once you are done writing, look at your list of previously published content and figure out a way to link to a couple of those pieces in your current post. So long as it makes sense.

Use Internal Headings

Aside from breaking up the copy, Google’s algorithm looks at the headings inside blog copy, not just the headline, as part of its search. If necessary, write your copy and then come up with a few internal headings to insert into the text.