Rookie Content Writing Mistakes
There’s no shortage to possible content writing mistakes you might make on WordPress blogs. In fact, some content writing staples you’ve read thousands of times may not even dawn on you while you’re reading it, yet you know there is a problem with written content without being able to put your finger on it. It’s the ability to identify these problems that will help you not only correct current errors you’re making but avoid making these mistakes.
Writing Your Content Like an English Paper (or Book)
You’ve been trained to write content a certain way. In school you’re trained on how to write the classic five-paragraph essay. Then as you move into high school, you learn how to craft research papers (which continues on into college). With what you write you craft often larger paragraphs, each centered around an individual topic. All of that is great for the style of writing and for the format, but writing online is a different animal.
The thing with writing online you need to remember is people have a short attention span. If someone’s reading a research paper, it’s because they want to read it. When someone arrives on your website, they may not know yet if they want to read a blog post. That means any kind of big chunk of paragraph text may frighten them away. So even if you are all writing on a singular topic, you need to break up paragraphs into just a few lines. Some online writers prefer to make every sentence its own paragraph, while others might bunch two, at the most three sentences into the same block.
See, all of this right here that you’ve read in this “Writing Your Content Like an English Paper” section could realistically be a single paragraph. But that would be too large of a paragraph and, chances are, you would have skipped right over it. Because when reading content online, who wants to read such a large paragraph?”
To increase readership and to make it easier on your visitors, one of the biggest mistakes you need to avoid is writing content like an English paper (or book).
Stuffing Keywords
Even if you haven’t worked as a content writer before, chances are you’ve heard about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the importance of keywords.
In previous renditions of Google’s search engine, keywords played an especially important role within the text. However, this led to writers and websites abusing keywords. Many would do what is known as “keyword stuffing.” With keyword stuffing a writer would inject a certain keyword and key phrase more than necessary even if it disrupts organic flow of the text.
At times, a website would even include blocks of keywords at the bottom of a page to do nothing else than inflate the keyword numbers on search engines.
Google and other search engines caught onto this tactic and have done everything in its power to devalue the use of keywords.
While it is still important to use keywords in your text, you need to keep it organic feeling. Anything more than this and it will feel forced and Google may end up penalizing you.
Not Taking Advantages of Visuals
A picture is worth a thousand words, so not taking advantage of images is a detriment to your content writing. You can easily insert pictures into WordPress blogs. With the WordPress blogs you’re able to insert images with no problem.
An image helps break up your text and adds visual interest to it. People are more likely to retain information when there are images utilized. If you’re not using images, you are harming the potential of your website and the readership (and returned readership). So always do what you can to take advantage of pictures.
Use Poor Grammar and Spelling
If you’ve ever tried to read content online only to feel like it was written by an amateur who doesn’t know basic English, your not likely too return two that sight. You’re especially not likely to share the post. Poor linguistic skills destroy the credibility of your content. This doesn’t mean you have to have a PhD in English, but it is good to spend some effort to learn the finer points beyond getting your theiyer’es mixed up.
Best Strategies for Stellar WordPress Blogs
In order to make sure you have the highest quality WordPress blogs, there are several specifics you need to follow. First, keep in mind the common mistakes mentioned above. By doing this you’ll improve the flow of your content while helping the blog perform better on search engines.
The next point is to maintain a steady posting schedule. The most read blogs will post new content several times a week. Ideally, you’ll post something daily, but this might be difficult. Even if you’re not able to post daily try to write new content and post it once or twice a week. With WordPress blogs you can schedule posts. This way, if you’re feeling creative you can write out a handful of blogs at once, then set the publishing schedule. This way you don’t have to maintain a posting schedule on your own.
When working with WordPress blogs, it’s easy to go crazy with the different plug-ins and additions that work behind the scenes. These additional snippets of coding are helpful, but the problem with this is each little plug-in requires a visitor’s website to download the code, which drags down the load time. Load time is critical for the performance of your website. The faster your website loads the better off you’ll be; the last thing you want is for a potential reader to leave your site because it fails to load in a reasonable time frame.
Content writing doesn’t take up much in the way of download bandwidth. However, if the plug-ins you’re using causes a lag in load time you’ll see a drop off in viewership. So keep your website clean (plenty of a white background space) and go easy on the plug-ins for WordPress blogs
How to Make Sure You’re Not That Rookie
Most of the common mistakes new content writers make are easily avoided. By following through with these tips you’ll do yourself a favor and avoid the kinds of problems other writers make with WordPress blogs.
More White Space
Keep your “paragraphs” short. In fact, they really aren’t paragraphs (at least what your English teacher would consider a paragraph). You want plenty of white space breaking up the content on your page. You can do this easily by keeping your paragraphs to between one and three sentences.
It might feel odd doing this at first, especially if you’re coming from long format writing, but in terms of blog posts, you want to make it easily scannable. If you have chunks of text, this won’t happen. So add in extra paragraph breaks.
Don’t Overstuff Keywords
This is probably the biggest problem most new content writers run into. They’ve heard so much about the importance of keywords and SEO that they go overboard with it, and in return, end up hurting their website performance.
Sometimes the best way to avoid damaging your site SEO is to not think about it at all. Keep in mind the topic keywords you want to write about and include these words in a natural way. It is perfectly fine if the keywords only appear once or twice within the body of the text.
Search engines are excellent at picking up these keywords. In fact, search engines are able to detect when words are used in an organic nature and when the words are forced in. So only add in these words when it fits naturally and avoid using the keywords when not.
Images
Add images into your blogs to improve the flow of the content. However, format the images correctly. This is an issue many new (and even experienced) writers make. Format the image down to an acceptable size. An unedited .jpg file can be dozens of megabytes in size (if not larger). If the images aren’t formatted down in size, it will drag down load time and cause problems with the site performance.
Conclusion
When it comes to creating content online, WordPress blogs are some of the best options around. You can do just about anything you want with these WordPress blogs, which is why so many content writers turn to them. However, no matter how experienced you are with content writing, simple mistakes can derail your potential performance. To avoid this kind of problem it is critical to consider these problems and to do what you can to avoid them. By doing this you’ll increase viewership potential and subscriber numbers.
