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A 15-Point Checklist to Make Sure You’re Publishing Worthwhile Content by Julia McCoy #320

Ep. 32031 min2016-05-27

Publishing worthwhile content requires a 15-point checklist covering keyword research, unique angles, headline tuning, URL slugs, subheaders, imagery, internal and external links, metadata, excerpts, and clear calls to action.

Cover art for A 15-Point Checklist to Make Sure You’re Publishing Worthwhile Content by Julia McCoy #320
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Key takeaways
If you're just writing that post naturally, you may not have enough density in there for that key phrase.

About this episode

Are you confident in how good your blog, web page, or other form of online content is? Find out if you match up to Julia's list of 15 top copy guidelines!

Questions this episode answers

What is the most important question to ask before writing a blog post?

According to the episode, the most important question is whether people are actually looking for what you plan to write about. The hosts recommend using Google Keyword Tool or Giggles to check search volume and find secondary phrase variations to include in the content.

How should you handle keyword density in long-form content?

Write naturally to communicate with readers, but then go back and intentionally place keywords to hit a reasonable density. Writing naturally alone may leave too few instances of the key phrase, while overuse can spike density to harmful levels like 8 percent.

Why should you notify external sites you link to in your content?

The episode calls this a link building tactic. After publishing, you contact that site through its contact form and let them know you included a link to them. They will likely return the favor by linking back to your post.

How can you use meta descriptions more effectively?

The hosts suggest running AdWords ad campaigns where the post is the landing page, testing multiple ad copy variations, and then repurposing whichever ad earns the most clicks as the meta description. This tests real-world appeal before committing to the description.

In their words

You add that post, you put all this content, you link out, man, hit that contact form on that site with a link to your post.

Charles Lewis

Just like any good promotional piece, you need to give your readers some thing to do.

Host
Terms defined in this episode
Slug
The URL segment after the domain name. WordPress defaults to including every word from the headline, so the recommendation is to remove prepositions and conjunctions and keep only the target key phrase.
Excerpt
A short summary of a post, manually defined in WordPress, that controls the text shown in search results and post listing pages instead of letting Google pull random text.
Bumper Ads
A six-second unskippable YouTube ad format announced by Google, sold through AdWords on a CPM basis, appearing before videos on mobile and tablet devices.
Cross-linking
Hyperlinking a phrase in one post to a relevant previously published post on the same site, which helps SEO by signaling content relevance to search bots and increases reader engagement.

Full transcript is being added.

This episode answers

Matthew Bertram, host of The Best SEO Podcast
Matthew Bertram
AI keynote speaker · Owner & CEO, EWR Digital · President, ModalPoint

Matthew Bertram is an AI keynote speaker, creator of DIG™ (Digital Information Governance), and owner and CEO of EWR Digital. He helps energy and industrial leaders win visibility in AI search (GEO and AEO), is President of ModalPoint and CMO of the Oil & Gas Global Network, hosts The Best SEO Podcast, and has authored eight books including LLM Visibility. More about Matthew Bertram.

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