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Regardless of your blog’s niche, nothing holds more influence over its popularity and success than content. Content drives both human visitors and search engines to your blog, which subsequently encourages higher search engine ranking. Google even cites content creation as being the single most important thing a webmaster can do.
“Provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage.
This is the single most important thing to do. If your pages contain
useful information, their content will attract many visitors and entice
webmasters to link to your site,” wrote Google in an article titled Steps to creating a Google-friendly site.
But many bloggers struggle to produce engaging content that visitors actually want to read. If this sounds like a familiar scenario, we have some tips to help.
Write For Your Visitors
First and foremost, you should get into the habit of writing content for your visitors and not the search engines. Far too many bloggers focus on metrics like “keyword density” or “keyword ratio,” overlooking the big picture. Throw all of the metrics out the window and craft your blog’s content with the end user in mind.
Break Up Your Content
What does it mean to break up your content? Well, writing content without headings and subheadings results in a messy wall of text that’s difficult to read. When presented with a large wall of text, most visitors will choose to back out of the blog post or page without taking the time to actually read it. The human brain is hard-wired to read by scanning sections rather than word-for-word, left to right. To make your blog’s content easier to scan, break it up into sections and divide them with sub-headings, bullet lists, etc.
Publish Hot Topics
Of course, the topics of your content will also play a major role in its level of visitor engagement. If there’s newsworthy topic that your target audience is currently interested in, try creating a post about it. Perhaps you can give your own personal perspective on the topic, or maybe you can ask visitors what they think. The bottom line is that you should include relevant, trending topics in your blog to boost visitor engagement and search engine visibility.
Add Images
There’s a reason why all of our blog posts have images: because it makes them more appealing while boosting visitor engagement. Try to get into the habit of including at least one relevant image in each of your blog posts.