A Website blog is one of the integral aspects of a successful business marketing strategy and SEO (search engine optimization). If you are truly serious about ranking on search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, along with driving traffic to your website, then blogging is critical! 

With Showit you get the benefit of an elegant website and blog design along with the technological power of a WordPress blogging platform!

The Basics of blogging on Showit

Showit is a website design tool that allows you absolute freedom in design, while WordPress is its content management tool used at the back-end to upload your blog posts – Your blog theme is designed in Showit, and you write the actual blog posts in WordPress. It couldn’t be simpler or convenient!

To begin blogging – write and publish a blog post; you will need a fully designed Blog Index Page and Single Post template on your Showit account and domain connection. 

Step 1: Log in to WordPress

Log in to WordPress (YourDomain/wp-admin) with your Showit username and password to access your Dashboard.

Step 2: Compose your Blog Post

You can compose your blog post in a word processing document and copy-paste it into WordPress. However, to avoid formatting issues, we recommend writing your blog post directly in the WordPress editor, Notes (on macOS systems), or Google docs. 

Remember, longer content typically ranks better in Google. We recommend at least 300 words, but more realistically 1,000 or more if you want your post to be competitive on Search Engines. Also, remember to use a structured title heading hierarchy (H1, H2, H3) to create a quality reading experience.

Step 3: Add Images

To add images to your blog post, 

• Resize images for an optimal loading time. It’s best to resize images to 1500px on the longer edge. The Showit subscription includes the use of Smush Plugin once activated for this purpose, and you don’t need to take any additional image compression-related actions. An optimized image that loads faster signals to Google that your site has a good user experience! 
• File names of your images should be descriptive (e.g., Branding-Website-Design-Studio versus IMG_12345-01).
• Upload/Add your images to your WordPress media library.
• Write Alt text (alternative text) and description for each image. ‘Alt Text’ represents the “why” of an image related to the content of a web page and displays on the page if the image fails to load on time, is read aloud to users by screen reader software, and is also read aloud to users indexed by search engines. 
• Select the appropriate image size from the ‘Image Size’ field (if in doubt go with ‘Full Size’).

Step 4: Permalink

You can ignore this field since it would be auto-generated according to your WordPress setting completed during the initial blog setup.

Step 5: Select or Add Blog Category

If we’ve designed your website, all relevant categories would be set up at the design phase, and all you would need to do is select the appropriate category for the blog you are composing. This serves as a filter for your website visitor to view posts under a specific category.

Alternatively, you can create a new category by selecting ‘Add New Category.’

Step 6: Add a Featured Image

Unless you specifically upload the featured image, WordPress will consider the first image posted to your blog as the Blog Image, which may not be on-point for your brand.

A featured image appears on the Blog Index page, listing all your published blog posts. Remember that the featured image aspect ratio should be aligned to your website design while uploading to avoid any formatting issues – don’t upload a portrait image when your Blog theme is set up for a landscape or square image orientation. Follow the same guidelines to upload a featured image as highlighted above.

Step 7: Add Blog Excerpt

Ideally, this should be a couple of sentences from your first intro blog post paragraph summarizing the post content.

Step 8: Optimizing your blog post for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) using ‘Yoast’

To optimize your Showit blog post and website for SEO, Showit offers a built-in plugin, Yoast. It is an excellent way to ensure that you’re not missing any significant search engine optimization opportunities with each blog post.

The Yoast plugin appears in all of your blog posts under the blog and evaluates your blog content on two metrics, namely readability and SEO. 

These appear as red, yellow, or green traffic lights to show how well your post is optimized. We recommend using Yoast as a guide, not an exact science. For example – the “readability” metric will show red if you use too much passive voice. But, if that’s how you have composed your blog tone of voice, your conversational tone will capture attention, and that’s okay! It’s all about ensuring your website has a good user experience. Also, be sure to fill in all the relevant fields to maximize your SEO potential – Focus key phrase, SEO Title, Meta Description.

Focus Keyphrase:

The focus keyphrase is a phrase you want your post to be listed for on the search engines.

Note: Since Google uses the Blog Post title to understand your post topic, the absence of your focus keyphrase in the blog post title may harm your SERP ranking. Additionally, website visitors will be more likely to click on a search result closest to their search term/phrase. Therefore, for best results, try to add your key phrase at the beginning of the SEO title.

SEO Title:

Whenever you search a term or phrase on a search engine, a list of results appears as snippets. These snippets consist of your Page SEO Title and Meta description. Its purpose is to help you rank for your keyword plus invite clicks, lead visitors to your website and read your post.

Meta Description:

A meta description is an information about your blog post that appears in the search engine results below the title / URL of your page. It does not directly factor into your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rank but influences whether a user clicks on the link to your page.

Step 9: Publish your Blog Post on Showit!

Always preview your post before publishing to see how it will look by clicking ‘Preview Changes.’

You can also choose to publish immediately or set a specific date and time to publish. That means you can schedule your blog posts in the future, automating the process! When your post is published, it will automatically populate your Showit blog design. 

And that is all there is to publish your blog post from scratch on Showit!

Want a high-end elegant Business Brand and Website design – Connect with us or Book your complimentary discovery call.