5 Ways To Increase Blog and News Effectiveness
Jan 10, 2023
Blog posts and news articles are a great way to add new content to your website and build site authority, both of which are great for SEO. These are also great tools for creating content related to the keywords your customers and potential customers are searching for, or to drive traffic towards the areas your business is trying to grow. The ATLAS Kentico environment has both blog and news pages with corresponding widgets that allow you to place a feed of either content on any page.
Title and Alias
It's important to have a page title that captures the attention of your audience, while also accurately representing what your article is about. When you create a title in Kentico, this will automatically be used to generate the page alias which is then used in the article's URL. The page alias for this page is in bold: https://atlas.atlasportals.com/support/best-practices/5-ways-to-increase-blog-and-news-effectiveness
A page alias should not contain capital letters, spaces, or special characters. Kentico should automatically remove most of these things, but it's a good idea to double check your page alias before posting your news or blog article. This is also a great opportunity to shorten your alias and make your URL easier to type and share.
To change a page alias, select Page Alias under the Properties tab.
*Note that changing a page alias changes the page's URL, so its best to do this when creating the page to avoid broken links.
Thumbnail sizing
Blog posts and news articles can be accompanied by a thumbnail image which is used in most blog and news feed configurations. When uploading a thumbnail image, be sure to keep a few things in mind:
- Upload a thumbnail sized image. Be sure the image you upload is actually thumbnail sized. A good rule of thumb is to stay somewhere around 150-300 pixels in width and height. Using a larger image will add load time to any page featuring a blog or news feed widget. If you have a blog or news feed on your home page, this is especially important as home page load time is a major factor in your site's SEO performance. Resizing the image within Kentico will just change the appearance of the image, not the actual size and weight of the file.
- Use the same ratio. To keep your news and blog feed looking crisp and clean, be sure all thumbnail images are the same ratio (or even the same size if that's easier to remember!).This will keep your feed neat and aligned. Squoosh is a great way to quickly and easily adjust your image sizing and ratios.
Crawlable text
While it can be tempting to include many graphics and images in a news article or blog post, it's important to remember that search engines can only crawl the text that is on the web page itself. It's not able to crawl text in a graphic. News and blog page types are built specifically to hold text, so try to keep graphics and images to a minimum and use this as a tool to share relevant and insightful content your customers are interested in! Incorporate words and phrases potential customers might be searching for on Google or other search engines.
Call to Action
Though not relevant to every article, a CTA (call to action) should be something you atleast consider for every article. It's helpful to think of why you are sharing this content and what you hope to achieve. If you are hoping the reader finishes reading and choses to explore your site, visit a location, apply for a job, or fill out a contact form, be sure to a include a link for that in the article! Try to include a keyword in your button or hyperlink related to that action (i.e. Explore Our Agriculture Careers, Find Propane Near You).
Don't forget the Metadata!
This is how search crawlers will find your article, so be sure to take a few minutes to complete this step! Include a Meta Title and Description that summarize what the content is about. If you can keep your article or post title to 60 characters or less, don't be afraid to also use it as your meta title! Include any keywords the article focuses on. This information is crawled by search engines and also displayed in search results and browser tabs. To edit Metadata, select Metadata under the Properties tab.
To talk to someone about setting up a blog or news feed, send us an email at atlas@landolakes.com. You can also refer to the following pages: