On June 13th, Mary Kathryn and Charlotte hosted a Writing Great Posts workshop.
This workshop focused on three areas: writing great post titles, writing great posts, and promoting your post.
Writing Great Post Titles
The few words that make up the headline are the most important few words in your post. Why?
- it’s what will entice people to read (or discourage them from reading)
- it’s what appears in Google
- it’s what will get you to appear in google
Here are 5 things to consider when crafting your title:
- Use Key Words
- Keep it Simple
- Grab Attention
- Meet a Need
- Describe
I find it easiest to write the headline first (and then come back to it to make it better later) so I know in my mind the main point of the post. It helps keep the post focused.
Writing Great Posts
The backbone to writing great content, whether it’s in a post, a page, or an event, is to make sure that your writing is SAS – scannable, accessible, and searchable.
- Scannable: People rarely read web pages, they scan which means you only have about five seconds to grab their attention.
- Accessible: As per the AODA regulations, all new content has to be AA WCAG compliant. When I think about accessibility, I think beyond compliance. I think about the person who is using the screen reader, or the special keyboard to navigate the site. This helps to think about what their experience is with your site.
- Searchable: This is all about being found on Google. Coming up high in search engines. Essentially every time someone types a search query into Google, robots scan websites to find matches. They scan millions and millions and millions of web pages. So this is all about your website being found by Google search robots. And we do that through SEO. There are things on the backend of your site that help with this, and there things with your content.
Here are five tips to help you write great posts that meet our SAS requirements:
- Break up long paragraphs – no more than 50 words per paragraph
- Write short sentences – between 20 and 40 words (avoid filler words, simple language)
- Break up the text with bullets
- Use standalone sentences
- Use active voice (easier to read) and pronouns (easier to relate to)
It also helps to start with a framework. For example, you may begin with an intro line, then a lead in followed by your main points (use your H2 and H3 headings here!), and then your conclusion.
Promoting your Post
Now that you’ve crafted the perfect post, how do you make sure that people are reading it?
- Tap into Carleton’s social media community
- Subit your post to Today @ Carleton – titles matter here! I personally prefer to put a synopsis of my post in TAC and then link to it for more information. This does two things: gets your main point across and drives traffic to your website.
- Use your categories/RSS feeds to push to other pages on your website
Interested in attending our next workshop?
We will be holding these workshops each month, so we’d love to have you come out!
Our next workshop is on conducing a site content review. In this workshop we will dive into your analytics reports to find out what is and what isn’t working for you.