How to Write a Good Blog Post

Writing technical content is fun and a great way to give back to your community. We wanted to share tips and guidelines to publish a great blog post on Codiga!

Rule #1: Find the right keywords to target

You want to write content people will enjoy. Without searching and finding the right keywords, your content will not be seen and nobody will access it. First, find the right keywords you want to target so that people find your content.

There are a lot of tools to find good keywords (as shown in this article):

It does not really matter what tool you use, what matters is to use a keyword with:

a lot of search volume (more than 1,000 searches a month for it)
not a lot of competition (e.g. there is not a lot of content targetting this keyword)

Rule #2: Manage keywords in your submission

The keywords you target must appear at least 12+ times in your text. This is really critical that these keywords appear multiple times in key aspects of your blog post:

The keywords must appear in the slug of your article
The keywords must be in your post title
The keywords must appear in most of the section names of your article

You will repeat these keywords also in your text to reach 12+ occurrences. But it's really critical you put them in the title and most of your section name.

Rule #3: Organize your thoughts

Your post should have at least 3 to 6 sections. If your post has more than 6 sections, you may need to divide your post into two different posts.

Make sure you clearly divide your ideas into sections. Give a name to each section and incorporate the keywords in the section name.

Rule #4: Have enough content

Make sure you have between 600 and 1,000 words in your content.

Rule #5: Illustrate with pictures

Add pictures to your blog post to illustrate your content.

Make sure your picture focuses on what you want to show (e.g. no need to take a screenshot of your entire screen if you want to show only a specific area)
Make sure your picture is less than 800KB in size
Take a video if you want to show how to use a product
Make a GIF if you need to show a short action (but make sure the GIF is less than 1MB in size)

Rule #6: Organize your content for publication

When preparing a blog post, your blog post must be in a Google drive folder. The blog post must be a Google document and all pictures must be located as independent files in the folder that contains your blog post.

The folder that contains your submission should look like this: a Google doc with all the required pictures to include in the post.

IMPORTANT: a Google doc with the embedded pictures is great for visualization but does not allow for retrieving/fetching the pictures independently. Make sure each file is added separately in the folder that contains your blog post.

Rule #7: Use Grammarly to check for English errors

Always, always, always use Grammarly or LanguageTool to check that your content is grammatically correct.

Rule #8: Add links

Add enough links to your content. Your post should have at least 5 links to Codiga or external websites.

Rule #9: Take the reader's perspective

Always take the reader's perspective and do not assume the reader knows anything about the topic you are talking about. If your blog post talks about a feature of a specific tool, make sure you add links to install and set up the tool.

Always come with the mindset that the user may not be totally familiar with the topic you are talking about.

Rule #10: Optimize for SEO

Title must be between 50 and 60 characters
Description of the article must be less than 150 characters
Include the keywords you target in your submission
Each picture must be under 50kB (exceptions are GIF)