17 things to check before publishing content online

Creating content for online is a broad task, regardless of whether you are writing a blog post or some copy for your site. Only the optimisation part is overwhelming to a lot of authors. However, there are some simple things that you can do to make your pages perform better. Here are 17 of them.

Compelling content will be found, read and shared. The two checklists below consist of questions that will help you improve your content.

Things to check before publishing:

1. Have you decided on what persona you are creating this content?

2. Have you thought about if this information is helpful to your persona, i.e., meeting her needs and/or challenges?

3. Have you thought about what keywords or phrases your persona would use when searching for this information, related indirectly or directly to your topic? TIP: Look for ideas in Google Autocomplete.

4. Have you created a headline that is topic based and engaging for your persona?

5. Will your preamble make your persona eager to continue reading your text?

6. Have you helped your persona scan the text using short paragraphs and, by providing key information in subheadings and bullet lists?

7. Are you providing the right visual content, i.e. do your images help your persona understand what you discuss and gain the right insights?

8. Does your text explain and define key terms related to your topic?

9. If you are writing a blog post, have you made it easy for your persona to find your page, i.e., is it published to channels where she might be active?

10. Have you provided a call to action (CTA), or contact info, that helps your persona to relevant actions?

Additional things to keep in mind:

1. Have you provided any possibilities for your persona to find related information, i.e., have you included relevant internal and/or external links?
2. Have you focused upon a topic and then used, for your persona, relevant search queries/phrases throughout the text?
3. Have you used a varied language, i.e., relevant synonyms and related terms?
4. Have you checked that your title is maximum 70 characters, i.e., ensured that it not is cut when displayed offsite.
5. Have you written a short and engaging meta description, i.e., the text that commonly will be used as a teaser when someone is sharing to social media?
6. Have you used images without copy? Words should be in text fields and your alt tags.
7. Have you labeled image files using a naming convention that allows for image search optimisation, for example, Company-Name-Category-Subcategory-Image-description.jpg

Based on the lists above, I have compiled a guide (ppt) with recommendations. Feel free to download; the content will help you improve your page performance:

This was the fourth post in a series of articles on the topic ‘Writing for online’. If you are interested in doing your own keyword analysis, you can find a couple of good tools and tips in ‘What to focus on when deciding keywords—and three research tools to use’.