Anatomy of a Blog Article – What You Need To Consider
Modern blog articles have some pretty standard features about them and many of these features are optional. However, every aspect of the anatomy of a blog article needs careful consideration to ensure your work has the best chance of standing out from the crowd.
From a “behind the scenes” point of view writing for online is quite different from writing for a printed publication, so it is important to get things right so your article gets listed properly in search engines and directories and more importantly that it gets shared appropriately by its readers.
A blog article that is easy to share is likely to stand a better chance than one that’s need a little work from the readers side.
Standard features of a typical blog article
(A) URL – often known as a Permalink – a unique web address.
(B) Title - descriptive enough to be used out of context (for example in directories and search results).
(C) Body – the article itself which can contain words, images, links, videos, and other content. A typical blog post length is around 500 words but this is highly flexible and can literally range from none at all (for a video post for example) to several thousand.
(D) Sharing – Technically, sharing information isn’t contained within an article, but it’s worth mentioning here as getting the sharing information right can provide an opportunity to reach more potential readers as well as providing a mechanism to let others easily share your articles.
(E) Comments – though not all blogs switch comments on they play an important part in allowing readers to interact with the articles they read.
Optional features of a typical Blog article
(F) Metadata – including categories and tags
(G) Author – this is becoming more important as the web moves to “authority of content“.
(H) Date and Time
(I) Teaser/Snippet (not shown) – often just a snippet of the body but sometimes a specially written introductory summary. The snippet is the part that often shows up in search results.
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