To make things easier and more useful for everyone, please follow the following guidelines when contributing to this site.
Prepare Your Post
- Your post must be unique. If you have a post already written, please review it and make significant changes, which include the items listed below
- Review the site’s categories and tags and choose a suitable topic and a positive/useful/generous message
- Even if your aim is to promote something, write your post for the benefit of the reader
- Pick a focus keyword for your post. Ideally, this is a 3-4 word phrase that is likely to attract web searches. Good example: active living ideas. Bad example: happiness (too broad)
- Use American English
Create Your Post
- Include your focus keyword phrase in the title and first paragraph of your post
- Include your focus keyword 3 times in your post, as well as some variations of it
- Split your post into sections
- Give each section a heading and make it a proper Heading 2, NOT bolded text
- If you have written your post in some word processor, log into the site, choose Posts->Add New, enter the title and paste the content into the editor
- If your content contains formatting, remove it with the button highlighted in green (if this button is not visible, click the button highlighted in red first)
- Pick the most suitable category for your post
- Tag your post – click “Choose from the most used tags” and then click the most suitable 3-4 tags. If a great tag can be used that isn’t listed, add it, but try to pick from the list first
Link Responsibly
Google is getting increasingly clever at detecting search engine manipulation through links. The last thing we want is to trigger “manual action” from Google.
- Your author bio may contain a link, which Google will be able to see on the page. If your bio link points to a commercial site, please try to avoid linking again to the same site
- If you include a link to a site you wish to promote, point it at a publicly-available information page, such as a post, and avoid linking to a sales page of any kind
- If you include a link to a site you wish to promote, create at least 2 additional links on the page point them a publicly-available information pages, such as related posts on this site, Wikipedia pages and related posts on other blogs
Add Images
- Find free-to-use images that suit the topic and message of your post. You can find great free images on Pixabay, Unsplash and Flickr’s royalty free category.
- Images should be in “landscape” orientation, i.e. wider than they are tall
- Pick the smallest size that is at least 930px in width
- Upload the image and give it a meaningful title. When the post is published, this title will be converted into the image URL, so using keywords in the title is good for SEO
- Enter alternative text that describes the image content to a vision-impaired person. Keywords in this description are also great for SEO
- Insert images into the post on separate paragraphs, using the “Large” size with alignment “none”
- Click “Set featured image” and choose the first image in the post
Optimize Your Post
This is important to do, as it will give your post, and the site in general, more visibility.
If you have never used Yoast SEO to optimize a post, please go through this video tutorial first.
- Enter your focus keyword in the Yoast SEO box
- Click “Edit snippet” and write a meta description for the post that contains the focus keyword and invites potential visitors to click through to the post
- Review the Yoast SEO analysis and attempt to get a “green light” for your keyword optimisation
- Review the Readability analysis and attempt to get a “green light” for readability
Save Your Post
Once you’ve contributed a few posts according to the above guidelines, you will be able to publish your own posts, but initially, you will only be able to save them as drafts.
- Copy the top 2-3 paragraphs into the “Excerpt” box (below the Yoast SEO box). This is the “teaser” text that will appear on archive pages
- Click “Preview” and check that everything looks good. If not, change and click “Preview” again until you’re happy
- Click “Save Draft”
- Email me to let me know you’ve added a post
Thank you for your contribution,
Gal