What To Do After Publishing Your Blog: A Simple Step by Step Guide

Ahh, finished you think to yourself as you take a sip of tea. You have finally completed your blog post. But now what? In this post I will take you through what to do with your blog post now its live.

Check your structure

1. Start by checking your headings. Make sure your page has one H1 at the top and H2 headings for each section. You can check this using the free SEO Reviews Tool.‍
2. Next, check your meta fields. Have you added a meta title, meta description, and social sharing image These are usually found below the main body of your post inside your website editor.
3. Make sure your content uses lists, quotes, and drop downs correctly. Search engine robots love structured content, especially lists. Use the list formatting buttons so they read properly.

Index it in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools

NB: You will need to have google search and bing set up already to continue.

Once your post is structured and published grab the URL of the page and head to Google search console.

1. On Top of your page you will see a search bar, enter your url here and hit enter on your keyboard.

2. You will see that your url is not indexed yet, click on the request indexing button. This will take a couple of minuets.

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This means that your new blog URL will be read and indexed soon by Google bots. This will help it appear in search results when someone searches something relevant to your blog post, most likely it will be a keyword in your blog title that appears.

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Next head over to Bing webmaster tools

1. On the left hand panel find the "URL inspection" button and click it. You will be taken to a page with a search bar and paste your blog url in there.

2. Again when you inspect your URL you will see it is not currently on Bing search, click the request indexing button.

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3. You should get a message to say it has been requested. You can now close those tabs, you have indexed your new blog into Google and Bing search! 

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Shout about it

Your blog is live and indexed. Now it is time to share it.

Create social media posts by pulling short quotes or ideas from your blog, then link to the full article. You can share it on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, or wherever your audience is spending time. If you have a newsletter, add it there too. Here is a ChatGPT prompt you can use to create your social posts. Replace the bracketed areas before you run it.

Here is a blog I have written about [X]. Create [Linkedin, facebook, instagram] post using some of the content form the blog and a call to action for them to read the whole blog post. Keep my tone the same and do minimal edits to my writing. [Include your blog post here - copy and paste]

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Summary

Blog posts are a great way to generate organic traffic, however search engines do not know when a new blog post or web page is published untill it recrawls the website, this could take days, weeks or months. That's why it is crucial to tell them that you have new or updated content on your site. They will then add you to the que and send out a bot to read the post, index the important information and make it available to the wider public.