In this post, we are going to discuss how editors and publishing experts can do a quality check when it comes to reviewing a piece of content and publish it. Many several times, editors are responsible for publishing the blogs or it is handed over to the social media manager. Not always, it is the author who publishes a blog. Therefore it becomes essential to do a quality check and review before the article is published.
Pre Publishing Checklist for Editors and Writers
- Ensure the primary and secondary keywords are incorporated into the content
- Image sources need to be mentioned
- Necessary citations should be provided in the post
- The blog post should have appropriate images added to attribute the message.
- Meta description should be provided by the writer and is in-sync with the content
- Sub-headings are optimized for keywords
- Ensure the article is checked for plagiarism.
- You’re using robust grammatic editing tools like Grammarly premium to ensure the content is appropriate and appealing to read.
Blog Publishing Checklist: Why Should You Check for ‘Keywords’?
As a publishing expert, you should ensure that the article is optimized for keywords. While necessary instructions are provided to the writer, it can sometimes happen that the blog post is not well optimized for the primary keyword and the long-tail keywords. In such cases, you might consider returning the work to the writer to reassess his or her work. Even if this requires a few iterations, you will end up publishing SEO optimized blog content in the long run.
Blog Publishing Checklist: Why Image Sources Need to be Mentioned?
Giving proper credits to images will ensure that your article is in complies with the usage rights for images. Also, this enables you to understand if the image included in the blog post is from a royalty-free site, creative commons, free google search images, or in-house graphics created by a team member.
Blog Publishing Checklist: Incorporating the Habit of Citations
Citations are essential to validate the facts presented in the article. If the blog posts are not properly cited, it becomes challenging to ensure the credibility of the content, and also it takes much longer time for the editor to do fact checks. Thus, having proper citations can be very handy and is also crucial from search engine point of view. Although this can be an additional budget for budget writers, the long term benefits outweigh the efforts.
Blog Publishing Checklist: Adding Relevant Images
Yes, you shouldn’t be adding images that don’t make any contextual relevance. Your visitors would end up getting lost between the context of the textual content and the images. It also brings ambiguity within the content of your post. Therefore, one should train the writers to find and add only appropriate phots that go well with the context of the article. It is imperative to give minute attention to the images and check them for relevance.
Blog Publishing Checklist: Why Meta Descriptions are So Crucial?
Meta descriptions are, in fact, critical, and a lot of articles don’t have proper meta descriptions. Writing a good and catchy meta description has a higher correlation with the increased CTR on the search results page, and thus can bring in more traffic to your article pages. Mostly, writers are not instructed to include the meta description in their article, and the options are left empty when the articles are published.
Blog Publishing Checklist: Always Look Out for the Appropriate Headings
Ensure you have at least five heading tags in the writeup. Head tags have high SEO value, and they are taken into consideration after the title tags when it comes to ranking a piece of content. We have talked more about optimizing heading tags in our article, which you can take a look at. Every article before publishing should be checked for in-depth information and relevant heading tags.
Blog Publishing Checklist: Do a Complete Plagiarism Check
While writers would ensure that their content is free from plagiarism, it is always recommended to run a good plagiarism checker, and the free online plagiarism checkers don’t do any justice. I strongly recommend you to go for Grammarly premium that helps with a line by line plagiarism check along with highlighting the grammatical errors.
Blog Publishing Checklist: Grammatical Errors Imply Callousness
If you do a quick grammar check on the top articles in Google search results, you will end up finding tons of mistakes. Most of the writers are in a hurry to publish the blogs, and they somehow manage to complete the content and skip checking for grammatical errors, appropriate choice of words, contextual irrelevances, redundancies, and more. For solo entrepreneurs, bloggers, it is not possible to keep an in-house editor, and it is also next to impossible to be your editor. So, again, the need for a good grammar checker becomes a priority. When you’re publishing the post, please make sure to run a spell and grammar check.
Roundup
The task of the editor of the publishing expert is to ensure that the articles are nicely formatted, clean, and precise in structure. Additionally, you need to ensure that the keywords are well placed throughout the content, and a spell check is always running on the content. It is the least which you should be doing to ensure that the quality of the website is maintained. Eventually, this will increase the readership, engagement, and make your website a brand in itself.