There are a ton of different parts to proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and a million techniques and strategies and more. This article will focus on how to write your first blog post and submit it to The Rostrum, and a Basic SEO primer so you can get the most from your blog posts. If you can do this, team Caches will worry about the rest so you don’t have to.
This article’s SEO techniques will focus on what we in the biz call “on page optimization.” Meaning, organizing and optimizing your pages in a way that make it easy for search engines to index, summarize and distribute. The more a search engine has to figure out on its own, the more likely it will be wrong, and so the less likely they will place you higher. Google’s machine learning algorithm has gotten better at learning intent, but its far from perfect. Lesser search engines, which are just as important, are even more terrible at it. This is in contrast to “off page optimization” which is what we will be doing for you. So, lets feed the monster what it wants.
Now team Caches has done all the hard coding work for you, all you have to do is plug in your content in the right places. So read over this whole thing first, and then start at the beginning here
Planning #
Any good piece of content has structure. That is, a beginning, a middle, and an end. So before you even start writing, follow those basic principles. Search engines love structured content as much as people do. So make an outline of what you want your content to convey with your post. Figure out at least 3 major points you want to convey. Now 3 is just the minimum, you can certainly do more.
Writing It Out #
So now you have an outline of what your tryna say. Time to write. Now the editor box on Cache’s isn’t that great of a word processor, so I don’t recommend you write it in there if its of any length. I recommend using a word processor, and then doing a copy/paste into Caches. Caches accepts a few formats. Basic HTML formatting (with selection) and Rich Text Format (default). That’s great news though because Windows, macOS and most Linux distributions include a basic RTF word processor. On Windows that’s WordPad, macOS is TextEdit and on Linux you can use Kate or Abiword. You can of course use Microsoft Word, but I don’t recommend it as it doesn’t adhere to RTF standards usually, so sometimes you end up with anomalies when you paste it. LibreOffice Writer does however, and it’s free, so if you need a full fledged editor then try that first.
Formatting #
Part of any good article that is enjoyable to read is formatting. No one wants to read a wall of text or even a wall of broken up text all in the same font size. People are like me, they get distracted easy, so you need to constantly be getting their attention. Now obviously I use humor to keep peoples attention when I write, it’s a great tactic. I’m not going to focus on that though, well … maybe in another article. I’m going to let you in on a little secret though, I’m not actually that funny. It’s all in the delivery and when the only way you have to communicate is through text, you have to be able to emote to get your message across. That’s why formatting is so important. It’s emotion in text format.
So now you know why it’s important for the reader, but for search engines it’s also really important. It helps them organize long pieces of content, break them up into chunks, summarize them and deliver their customer exactly what they want, yep … exactly. Their customers want your personal data. But seriously, search engines like formatted content too. So what type of formats do humans and search engines both like? Well I’m glad you asked because I’m going to tell you anyway.
Header Tags #
What are header tags? Well you can’t see it, but the title of this section up there that says “Header tags” is tagged with code that tells it that its a heading section, level 4. Notice how the font is a little smaller than “Formatting” above? That’s to help people. Think about when you were in school and they taught you how to write like a human.
1. Introduction 2. Heading #1 2a. Sub Heading #1 2b. Sub Heading #2 3. Heading #2 3a. Sub Heading #1 3b. Sub Heading #2 4. Conclusion
See? It’s easy to follow. Like nested comment replies. The thought is contained in its own “thread.” People and search engines love threads. So how do we tell Caches to tag these headings? Well its really easy. When you’re writing, at the top of your word processor you should see a drop down, it probably says “Paragraph” by default. If you drop that down you can select Headings! Now Caches formats and has support for 6 headings deep. After that they will all be the same size. Also 6 is really small so it’s probably best to stick to 4.
Here’s something important though. The blog post title, that is Header 1 (h1). We automatically tag your title with the h1 tag and place it at the top of the article, so you don’t have to do it yourself. You should never have another header 1 anywhere in your blog post. Understand? So your header 1 is like the title of your essay, or your novel. Chapters always start with Header 2 (h2). Then subchapters start with Header 3 (h3) and sub-sub chapters start with Header 4 (h4). Does that make sense? So here’s how you should lay it out in your word processors:
Introduction content (paragraph formatted)
First Heading (heading 2 formatting) First headings content here. (paragraph formatting) Second Heading (heading 2 formatting) Second headings content here (paragraph formatting) First Sub-heading (heading 3 formatting) second heading sub-heading content (paragraph formatting) Second Sub-heading (heading 3 formatting) second heading sub-heading content (paragraph formatting) Third Heading (heading 2 formatting)
No need to indent, I just did it so it’s easier to visualize. Now that may seem complicated, but I promise I’m just making it that way. If you want to see proper formatting in action, look no further than this article you’re reading right now! Notice my use of heading → content → heading 2 → content? See you’re learning and you didn’t even know it.
Spacing #
No one likes a big wall of text, so some spacing is in order. Studies have shown that 4-5 lines per paragraph is the most people are willing to read before getting distracted. So after you’ve typed everything out, break the paragraphs up into 4-5 lines. Notice how I’ve done that in this article? Notice how you only have to go 1-2 paragraph blocks before there’s another heading? It keeps people engaged, and it helps them read, follow and understand what they’re reading.
Now what do you do if one of your headings just has a lot to say and you need to have 5 or 6 or 7 paragraphs? That’s where my good friend text formatting comes in. You can break up seemingly unpleasant “chunks” of content with things like italicizing your words, or maybe even bolding a really important sentence.
When we read, we’re subconsciously reading ahead a little and when you have a big wall of text, italics or bolds or even underlines give the reader something to “look forward to.” Now it sounds funny but it’s psychology and game theory in primitive form. It makes text look important and makes you want to get there to see what it says. Make sense? Also for the tldr; folks that skim, it helps draw their eyes to important things you want them to see in your post. It stops them mid-scroll to read it. 4D PsyOps!
Images #
Another great way to break up long pieces of text is images. Everyone loves images. A picture says 1000 words. Now you don’t want a lot of images, but some a good. I have personally found that placing a descriptive image in large blocks of text really helps to increase engagement. It can also help to drive home the point of your heading and its content. This is especially helpful when the content is technical or difficult to understand. Sometimes a small photo is all you need to go “AHA!” Search engines also love images. Not because they can see them but because they know humans can and they know humans love them. That goes for videos too. You can totally embed Youtube/Vimeo/Public Insta videos in your blog posts.
Other Formatting Techniques #
You can also use other things like ordered and unordered lists to help organize your content and drive engagement. Any time you have a piece of content with steps you should use ordered lists. Anytime you have a piece of content with multiple items, you should use unordered lists.
Ordered Lists
- The first step is always the hardest
- But once you get moving
- Momentum will carry you
- Then before you even know it
- You’re finished!
Unordered Lists
- Ramen
- Water
- Tent patch kit
See, doesn’t that look really nice now? It also kinda draws your eyes to it, makes it easy to read. It’s just nice. Search engines know people like that kinda stuff, so they place a little bit of value on it. So now you’ve got your article, with all your headings, sub headings, and formatting. Just copy and paste it in there and hit Publish, right? Nope, not yet! Here are some more things you should know first. These aren’t SEO best practices, lets just call them Caches best practices. These are so your published article looks professional across the entire website.
Image Selection #
Every post needs at least 1 photo. This is called the featured photo. So even if you’re a text only kinda human, you have to choose 1 photo. Personally, I like to search on Bing Images. You can filter by layout (wide), minimum size, even color. It makes finding the right featured image easy.
Image Sizing #
So if you were all gungho you already found your images and just dropped them into your word processor where you wanted them to go. Well, I hate to tell you this but you need to remove them. Why? Because we need to upload them to Caches before they will show correctly. So go back click on each one and delete them. Then, download your images and keep them in a folder somewhere for later. What I like to do when I’m writing, and I know I want to put an image somewhere, I will just write
[BIG ASS IMAGE GOES HERE.]
That way when I’m proof reading, it catches my eyes (formatting works!) and I know where to put my images later. Make sense? All the text formatting you can do in your word processor and it will transfer over fine, just not photos.
Now Caches is a highly sophisticated website, so when you upload an image it will automatically resize it to all the size it needs for previews, thumbnails, cover photos, etc… That way it looks great and it’s optimized on every page. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever resized a photo before, but sizing them down works pretty well, but sizing them up doesn’t.
So to meet all the requirements you’re going to want a MINIMUM of 1400px wide, and 300px tall. Now look, if you’re photo is 1378 x 291 or something you’re fine. Just don’t go too much smaller than that or the Caches resizer will have to size it up and it won’t look good. So, be sure to check the dimensions of the image.
Image Ratio #
Because the world now looks at the Internet through a little slit instead of a square monitor, all images should be in a landscape format. If you upload a square image it will still work. Our system will just skew, stretch and crop it to fit, so it won’t look right. So remember, landscape format works the best if you want your photos to look correct.
Posting It To The Caches Rostrum #
Ok, so you’ve got your text written out, text formatted the way you want, and a folder full of images ready to go. Now it’s time to post it to Caches and put our images in there. So let’s go ahead and go over to Caches and log in with our Web3 wallet.
After you’re logged in, select your username at the top right corner, and from the drop down click Profile to go to your profile page.
Begin Your Post #
On your profile page, scroll down until you see the tab for The Rostrum. Click!
Now on this page you will see all the blog posts you made. If you’re here, you probably haven’t made any blog posts yet, so it will be empty. No worries, that’s what you’re there for! So go ahead and click the “New Post” tab.
Now as you can see here we have quite a few fields to fill out. Don’t worry. It’s not hard. The first place you should start is right there at the top, with the Featured Image. Click that button and a window will appear to let you upload your image. Here’s a cool feature too: If you’ve uploaded an image to your personal file storage, timeline, group or anywhere on the site, and it’s marked public, you can select the “Media Library” tab at the top left corner and use it. No need to upload another copy, or find a new one. It’s best not to use the same featured image for every post though, so mix it up.
Post Title #
Ok, so now you’ve got your featured image uploaded/selected. The next field is the title of your blog post. Now post title’s are worse than tweets, Google truncates anything over 60 characters typically. Now that’s not to say they don’t read the rest of it, and people certainly do, so I would recommend keeping it about tweet size, at most, 140 characters. The closer to 60, the better. With that small of a space you really have to grab people’s attention though. With that said, pack what you really want to say in that first 60 characters and make sure it’s something that would make you want to click it.
Post Excerpt #
This is the little summary you see under the link in search engines … usually. Now search engines don’t have to use this, and sometimes they don’t. They use it less when it’s not relevant or an obvious attempt to game their algorithm. So what I typically do is take the first 160 characters of my article and paste it in there. Search engines do stop reading excerpts at 160 characters though. That’s because the excerpt here at Caches is also the Meta Description. What’s that? Don’t worry too much about it, you can’t see it, but the search engines can. So 160 or less, even if you have to just cut it off. Don’t leave it blank or too short though, your rankings and traffic will suffer if you do.
Post Content #
Now this is the document you wrote in the word processor earlier. You have a few options here. If you’re good with HTML, click the “Text” tab and paste it in there. Otherwise you will want to use the default “Visual Editor” to paste content from your word processor. Alright, we’re set! Time to paste your content into the box! I think you can handle this one. Just make sure the Visual tab is selected, then paste your article into the box! All of your text formatting should be correct, but scroll over it just to make sure it all looks right.
Putting your Images In The Post Body #
Now you’ve got your content in there. Text formatting looks good. Lets go back and replace all those image place holders. Scroll until you find your first [BIG ASS PHOTO HERE] place holder. Highlight the text, and press delete. Leave your cursor on the page where it is. Now go back up right above the text box and click the Add Media button.
That familiar Media Library window will open. Select an already uploaded image, by using the “Media Library” tab, or choose the “Upload Files” tab to upload a new one. Now this is super important for high quality images. By default the media library will choose the smallest size of the photo it can, the “Medium” size. We need to fix that. We want it to be the large size. In the media library, select your photo by clicking on it. Then in the right size pane of the same window, it will show you the Image Attributes. Scroll that pane down to the bottom until you see “Attachment Display Settings.” Click the dropdown for the image size and select “Large.” I also like to center images because it breaks up the content better (4D PsyOps!). I will leave that up to you though.
Now that is finished, click the “Insert into post” button. You should see your image embedded in the post content field right where your [BIG ASS PHOTO] place holder used to be. Using the same technique, go through your article replacing all your placeholders with the proper images.
Protip: You can upload all your photos (10 at a time) all at once. Just be sure to select a single photo before clicking “Insert into Post” or all 10 will go in there.
To Submit or Not, To Comment or Not #
Alright, you’re just about set. If it looks pretty good in that little editor box there, continue on. Now you have a few choices here at the bottom. You can disable comments, that way the general public can’t comment on your posts, or you don’t want to entertain arguments. You can also save this as a draft and come back to it later. Or, submit the article for review. Once you’ve submitted it, it will be sent to a Caches editor to review for compliance with our rules. You will be notified via Caches notification system when your article is approved, or disapproved.
That’s it! You’re done! #
Pretty simple. If you have any questions about disapproval, or need help writing your blog posts please send a Private Message to @CachesAdmin and we will do our best to assist you!
