5 Things You Need in Every Blog Post

Regardless of your industry or niche, I’m a big fan of using a blog to engage with your audience, establish yourself as an expert in your field, and boost your entire website’s SEO—aka drive more relevant traffic to your business.

All sound good? 😄

If you’re interested in blogging to grow your business, I’ve previously shared some general tips for blogging with Squarespace.

And, here are five things I recommend including in each of your blog posts:

What to include in your blog posts

1. Clear & engaging title

This may seem obvious, but a good blog post title is so important for your post’s overall success that it’s really the best place to start when crafting your post.

A strong title not only encourages people to read your post when they come across it (whether on your site, email marketing, or elsewhere), but it also helps to put your content in front of the people who most want to see it—yes, we’re talkin’ SEO (search engine optimization).

Well-crafted blog post titles will perform better with search engines than weak titles… and if you have a great post, we want to give people the chance to see it and read it!

I recommend using CoSchedule’s free Headline Analyzer to try out a few different post titles to see which might work best for describing your blog post content, engaging your target audience, and maximizing your traffic and search results ranking.

CoSchedule’s free Headline Analyzer to write headlines that drive traffic, shares and search results // 5 Things You Need in Every Blog Post // Five Design Co.

2. Blog post excerpt

To optimize your SEO and improve your blog posts’ ability to travel around the internet (including on your own website, perhaps in a related or featured posts summary block!), you’ll want to fill out the post excerpt metadata section for each blog post you publish.

Focus on clearly and succinctly summarizing your post content, using keywords (including variations of them, if necessary) and enticing viewers to read more.

It’s best to use the excerpt as a little teaser, rather than simply re-stating the main takeaways—you do want to leave readers some substance within the article rather than sharing it all in the excerpt.

Here’s an example excerpt from one of my blog posts:

Squarespace blog post excerpt, what to include in your blog post excerpt // 5 Things You Need in Every Blog Post // Five Design Co.

3. Blog categories & tags

They may not seem essential if you’re not specifically organizing and displaying the blog content on your site by category, but even if you choose not to display category or tag information on your blog posts, the information is still useful in several ways:

First, it boosts your blog post’s SEO by giving search engines an outline of the post’s topic and keywords.

And second, it allows you to do some behind-the-scenes work in connecting your readers with the content they’re looking for—by setting up your categories and tags for each post, you’re able to create blog post archives, related content blocks (see tip #5 below!), and improve readers’ ability to search for content across your site.

We want to make it super duper easy and streamlined for users to a) find the specific content they’re looking for on your site, as well as b) receive recommendations for additional relevant content they may be interested in. Because remember, the longer your website visitors stay engaged with content on your website, the more that helps your overall site-wide SEO (yay!).

In Squarespace, add your blog post categories and tags at the bottom of your blog post pop-up editor:

Squarespace blog categories and tags, how to add Squarespace blog categories and tags // 5 Things You Need in Every Blog Post // Five Design Co.

4. Clean blog post URL

In Squarespace (and other platforms as well), blog post URLs are typically set up to reference the date they’re published + the blog post title.

So, this post would look something like:

fivedesign.co/blog/2019/2/21/5-things-you-need-in-every-blog-post

That’s a lot of numbers!

There are several reasons you may not want to include the publication date in your URL:

If your post is intended to be evergreen (always relevant) content, this unnecessarily dates it, eventually making it appear less fresh.
If you intend to continue updating your post with new information as needed, this date becomes inaccurate.
It lengthens and clutters the URL, making it less user-friendly (and less SEO-friendly as well).

So instead, you can customize how Squarespace formats your blog post source URLs. Access this under Settings > Blogging > Post URL Format.

Here you can see I just use the post title and it’s cleaner and simpler:

fivedesign.co/blog/5-things-you-need-in-every-blog-post

Squarespace blog post URL // 5 Things You Need in Every Blog Post // Five Design Co.

One note about using numbered lists in your blog post URLs: If you ever want to come back to your list and update it (maybe add some more items to the list) and later on your title changes to “47 Things You Need in Every Blog Post,” then the original URL no longer matches.

I don’t mind here because I’m not going to update the list to 47 things, so I’m keeping the 5 in the URL. But if you did want to plan for possible future updates, you could simply adjust your blog post URL to /things-you-need-in-every-blog-post, and without including the number of “things,” it will remain relevant no matter how many items are actually on the list at any given time.

5. Promote related content from your site

As I’ve mentioned before, it’s a great idea to use new blog posts to link to other relevant content on your site because it helps people find more helpful information you’ve already published—and keeps them around longer, too!

There are a couple ways of promoting your website’s relevant content in your blog posts:

First, you can link to other pages or blog posts directly within your text. For example, now might be a good time to mention why I think blogging is a great strategy to grow your business and brand.

Pro tip: When using text links to promote your own internal content, it’s best to hyperlink descriptive text that describes the content of the page you’re linking to—this is an SEO best practice, and helps establish relevancy for the page you’re linking to.

The second way to promote related content in your blog posts is to create a Related Posts reel (usually at the bottom of your blog post), highlighting other blog posts with relevant content your readers might be interested in.

Here are two different methods of setting up a related posts reel on your Squarespace blog.

(And, you can check out the related posts reel at the bottom of this blog post to see how it looks in practice!)

Additional blog post tips & tricks

Depending on your specific business needs, there are likely other elements I would recommend including in each of your blog posts too (like an opt-in gift or Pinterest-friendly images), but these are the top five I’d recommend for any industry or niche.

Happy blogging!