Blogging - Best Practice

Blogging is a great way to engage with stakeholders as you can get your own opinions on key topics out into the wider world. Below you will find some useful tips for ensuring that people can access your blog and how to get the most out of blogging:

Frequency of updates

• It is crucial to post regular blog posts to keep the blog site content current and fresh.  You want to give the blog visitor a reason to come back.
• Post at least one blog per week.
• Remember that frequent short snappy blog posts are better than an overly long post once every month.
• The more blog posts you publish, the more chance your newest post has at gaining traction.
• The frequency of your blog posts will also affect SEO.  Google's spiders regularly crawl the web for content.  Any number of factors can affect the crawl frequency of individual sites. If Google comes back to the blog site to check for more content and doesn’t find any, it may be a long time before the spiders come back.

Responsibilities

• You will need to think about who will create content for the blog site, who will proof check and approve blog posts, and who will moderate the comments on each blog post each day.  For example, you may choose to have a number of students creating the blog posts each week but have a member of staff checking and publishing the posts.    
• Keyword research
  • Conduct keyword research before writing your blog posts. 
  • Create user and search engine friendly blog urls - include keywords in the url – this is done through the title of the blog post which becomes the url.
• Categories
  • Create categories for your blog posts – for example, our academic blog, View from the North which comments on current affairs has the following categories: Banking, Business, Education, Health, Misc, Politics and Society.
  • Assign blog entrries to a category - the categories appear on your blog homepage and are a really good way for readers to navigate your blog and jump to topics of interest.
• Enable Subscriptions via feed and e-mail.
• Blogs can take a while to get a good following so please do not quit.  Think about whether you can adequately resource the blog site before pursuing this activity with the e-Marketing team.

Audience

• Think about who your blog site is targeted at.  Ideally your blog will be targeted at audiences who have a higher propensity to share content online.

Blog set up

Optimising your blog content for users and search engines

• Content
  • Don’t plagiarise other bloggers.
  • Write about topics that your target audience cares about – the more interesting the topic, the popular the post will be.
  • Please use correct grammar and spelling.
  • Avoid writing big blocks of copy - short paragraphs are preferred by the typical blog reader.
  • Use a mixture of content for your posts – images, film clips and podcasts would make a post more appealing/interesting to the blog reader.
  • If an image is used within the blog post, please add in ALT text and try to add in keywords.
  • Pick out keywords from your blog post and incorporate them into the blog post title.  Avoid clever, cute or confusing titles – the title will appear in a number of places (top of post, search engine results pages (SERPs), feed readers and subject lines) - the goal of your title is to draw the reader into the post.  Aim for titles that are unique, specific, useful or urgent.
  • Give the blog post the correct size header tag for example, H1 for the main header for the blog post.
  • Add tags to all your headings (H1 and H2).
  • Don’t forget to fill out your page title and description fields for each post via the form at bottom of each post (in word press) – this meta data is critical to search engines crawling and indexing your site so please use keywords which are specific to the blog content.
  • Make sure you are using your keywords within the body of the text (but please don’t over use keywords).
  • Invite readers to leave comments by ending your post with a question (if it’s appropriate) – strong comments give an indication that people find what you are writing about valuable. The more comments, the better.
  • Links
    • If a link is added to your blog post, please use the hyperlink description tool and add keywords where possible.
    • Remember to link to old posts (each post is a valuable asset in which you can give new life to with each link) – linking to old posts can help to help reinforce your point, drive traffic, help SEO (Google spiders like links), help reinforce your point.
    • Please remember to link to other (University) blogs or areas of the website if the content is relevant to your blog post.
  • Social media sharing tools
    • Add social sharing tools to your blog site and blog posts to enable your blog visitor to share your post with their contacts.

Driving traffic to the blog site

• Once you are happy with your posts, you could drive web traffic to your blog by leaving comments on other relevant sites so they link back to your blog post.
• Link to other relevant bloggers to encourage others to join the conversation and give credit to other bloggers (where it is due and where it is appropriate).
• Use key social media tools to boost traffic to your blog site and blog posts – signpost to blog posts via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.
• Participate in Social Sharing Communities Like Reddit + StumbleUpon.
• Consider guest blogging (and accept the guest posts of others) – where appropriate.
• Use your email connections (and signature) to promote your blog.
• Connect your web profiles and content to your blog
  • Look at your online profiles on sites such as YouTube, slideshare, twitter and many other social and web 1.0 sites, and add in links to your blog site not only within the profile information, but possibly within other content. 
  • For example, if you have created a film clip for YouTube, add the link in the description of the clip, or have the url appear at the start or end of the clip.

Learn from the results

Don’t forget that the e-Marketing team can provide you with statistics for your blog site.

• You will be able to see where visits originate, which sources drive quality traffic and what others might be saying about you and your content when they link over.  Using this information you will be able to see how your blog readers were earned, and try to repeat the successes, focussing on the high quality and high traffic sources.

Track feed and email subscriptions.

• Every few weeks, check your subscribers and see what posts they are clicking on.  Identifying what posts are most popular will help you tailor you content to your target audience.

Please note - the University of Huddersfield will be issuing official blog guidelines, plus terms and conditions shortly.  Please contact the e-Marketing team for further information.