A blog is a great way to connect with customers and colleagues, or just to share your knowledge with others. If you are going to write for your company website, there are some guidelines that you should keep in mind. At Bad Armadillo, we have written hundreds of blog posts for clients across the country. This is our guide to writing blogs that are optimized for search engines and helpful and engaging to your readers.

1. Length. We recommended writing at least 300 words. Anything less will seem too thin to search engines. If you really can’t think of more than 300 words to say on a certain topic, then you probably shouldn’t be writing about it in the first place. On the upper limit, keep your post under 700 words. You don’t want your readers to be intimidated by the length of your article. People are busy. They may not even attempt to read your post if they think there isn’t enough time to finish it. If you really must write more than 700 words, consider splitting your article into two separate posts.
2. Keywords. You should usually have a keyword or two in mind when writing a blog. Try not to be too fixated on keywords. It’s alright to have some blog posts that are not keyword focused, but be sure you throw some in occasionally to keep the search engines happy. Whatever keyword you are targeting should be the main focus of the post and should appear in the title somewhere.
3. Title. Keep the title short enough that it will appear in the search engine listing. For Google, this means that it should be no longer than 70 characters.
4. Headings. Make use of headings. They allow readers to quickly see what information is in your post and skip to the part that is most helpful for them. It will also help search engines to determine what your article is about. (N.B. Don’t just increase the font size and bold your headers, use the header tag.)

There is certainly more to writing a great blog post than these four things, but with these in mind, you should be off to a good start. Following tip number one, we will post more on this topic later.