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10 Types of Blog Posts & How to Use Them Effectively

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10 Types of Blog Posts & How to Use Them Effectively

When it comes to writing a blog post, there are multiple formats you can use—and it all depends on the goal of your article and what your audience is looking for.

Here are some popular types of blog posts to know, along with examples of how to use them:

  1. How-to guides
  2. Content hubs
  3. Expanded definition posts
  4. Listicles, aka list posts
  5. Expanded list posts
  6. News
  7. Data studies
  8. Case studies
  9. Cheat sheets and checklists
  10. Templates

A how-to post offers a series of specific, chronological steps on how to achieve a goal. It’s typically structured like so:

Infographic showing structure of a how-to guide

For instance, this post is titled “How to Choose the Right Words for SEO” and shows you how to achieve that goal through a four-step process:

  • Step 1 – Find keywords with search traffic potential
  • Step 2 – Create content that aligns with search intent
  • Step 3 – Ensure the keyword has “business potential”
  • Step 4 – Make sure you can rank for the keyword

We then elaborate on each step by showing you how to execute it.

In the case of step one—finding keywords with search traffic potential—we suggested using keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planner and Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and then elaborated on how each tool works.

Excerpt of an Ahrefs article talking about GKP and Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Best practices

  • When chronicling your steps, be as specific as possible. Consider that your reader may ask, “How? Why?” and then fill these gaps to make your how-to guide substantial.

A content hub is an interlinked collection of content about a topic. 

Sometimes, you may have multiple blog posts on your website about a topic—let’s say SEO—but they aren’t housed in one place. That’s where a content hub comes in: It’s strategically built to boost your site structure for more traffic, links, and topical authority.

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In simple terms, a content hub comprises three parts:

  1. Your hub page – A high-level guide about the overarching topic (e.g., SEO). It usually includes links to subtopics that are sometimes split into chapters.
  2. Your subpages – These are in-depth guides about parts of the main topic. Each of these guides is split into yet more chapters.
  3. Hyperlinks – These connect the subpages to your hub page. The hub page links to all the subpages, and each subpage links back to the hub.

It may be a little confusing, so let’s take the example of our beginner’s guide to SEO. This is our hub page:

Hub page of beginner’s guide to SEO

We first give the reader an overview of what SEO is. This is followed by six hyperlinked chapters (with descriptions for each). Clicking on each of these chapters brings you to their respective subpages.

So if we click on chapter 1 (How Search Engines Work), the reader is taken to the subpage—which is split into yet more chapters so that you can easily hone in on a specific subtopic.

Subpage of "How Search Engines Work"

We’ve also included a hyperlink for each subpage to connect it back to our hub page.

Link that brings user back to hub page

Best practices

  • Map out a structure to ensure your content hub is well organized

Example of content hub in flowchart form: "Keto Dieting" is in the middle and branches out to pictures of different fruits and vegetables

  • If you have a topic in mind but aren’t sure how to structure it, follow these steps:
  1. Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
  2. Enter your search term (e.g., “link building”)
  3. Look at the top results to see how other websites structure their content hubs/guides
Content Explorer search results

3. Expanded definition posts

Expanded definition posts are somewhat similar to how-to guides. The difference is they start by focusing on the what before the how—because sometimes, you want to understand a topic in greater depth before getting to the actionable bit (i.e., the how-to).

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Here’s how it’s structured:

Infographic showing structure of an expanded definition post

Our blog post titled “What Is a Backlink? How to Get More Backlinks” is one such example of how this structure can be put to practice:

  • Introduction, then table of contents—bulleted summary of what you’ll learn
  • [H2] Why backlinks are important 
    • [H3] Rankings (elaborate)
    • [H3] Discoverability (elaborate)
    • [H3] Referral traffic (elaborate)
  • [H2] What makes a good backlink? 
    • Elaborate with H3s as above
  • [H2] How to check for backlinks 
    • Elaborate with H3s as above; add screenshots where necessary
  • [H2] How to get more backlinks 
    • Elaborate with H3s as above
  • Conclusion: Your final thoughts

It’s fairly straightforward. Tell the reader what to expect, explain why the topic is important and what they can do with it, then offer some steps on how to achieve a certain goal around the topic.

Best practices

4. Listicles, aka list posts

Listicles—also known as list posts—typically feature one tip, technique, or point per paragraph. They’re often used for non-chronological advice but, sometimes, have a poor reputation because many publications use the format for clickbait stories.

This BuzzFeed article accurately captures one instance of how the format is used:

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Excerpt of a BuzzFeed article titled "32 Cheap Things To Treat Yourself To Right Now"

The descriptions below each subheading are kept short so that readers can quickly capture information in a concise manner without having to stay on a page for too long. Listicles may also be image-heavy.

Excerpt of an image-heavy BuzzFeed article

Despite the poor rep that list posts may carry, they can be useful for readers who are looking for quick answers to certain questions—as in the case of this Search Engine Journal blog post titled “21 Web Directories You’ll Still Want to Use.” This is a good example of how an SEO or marketing listicle should be written:

Excerpt of an SEJ article

Best practices

  • We recommend not using sensationalist wording in your headline (like this BuzzFeed article). Instead, ensure your headline captures exactly what the blog post is about.
  • You can learn more about the best practices of crafting listicles here.

An expanded list post mimics the format of a listicle. The difference is this format is better suited to more complex topics—so each pointer on the list is beefed up to better explain a tip or idea.

Example of expanded list post about copywriting

It’s also why we don’t publish all that many list posts on the Ahrefs blog; SEO is a complex topic to unpack when compared to “lighter” content, such as the “best cafes in Singapore.” 

The blog post you’re reading now is also an example of an expanded list post.

Best practices

  • Since expanded list posts are lengthier than listicles, use images and H3s (a subsection that sits under your subheading) to break your points up. This very subsection is a H3.

Newsworthy blog posts contain time-sensitive information that’s relevant to your business and/or industry. This includes industrywide changes or trends that may affect your readers (or be of interest to them), as well as company or product updates.

Naturally, the piece of news you’d like to share should be disseminated as soon as possible, and, ideally, before other publications. This is especially so if you’re covering industrywide changes.

For example, let’s say Apple intends to announce the launch of its Mac Studio and Studio Display via a press release.

That same press release is first shared with multiple publications and kept on embargo (i.e., not to be published until a certain date and time). Based on the information, media outlets can build a story and schedule the news for publication—in the case of “fastest fingers first.”

Except of Google SERP on Apple's Mac Studio

Being quick to publish a newsworthy story also puts you in good standing with your target audience, who may over time regard your blog as a reliable and credible source of information. To achieve this, you need to be consistent in publishing accurate and timely content. 

Best practices

  • Use the inverted triangle so your most important information is up top
Inverted pyramid. "Need to know" at top, then "nice to know" at bottom

Data studies are a great way to earn backlinks.

At Ahrefs, we’ve run more than a fair number of data studies over the years—many of which have brought us traction on our socials.

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But don’t simply cobble data from multiple sources and claim it as yours. Instead, decide on what you want to first study.

One way to do this is by recreating outdated studies, which you can find using Ahrefs’ Content Explorer:

  1. In Content Explorer, enter a search term like [industry] + “study,” [industry] + “survey,” [industry] + “research,” or [industry] + “data”
  2. Set the filter to an In title search
  3. Set the Published filter to an older date range (e.g., 2010–2015)
  4. Sort the results by referring domains
Content Explorer search results

From here, you can identify popular and/or outdated studies to recreate and write about as blog posts.

Best practices

  • Create graphs so readers have a concise overview of your findings

Pie chart showing 7.4% of top-ranking pages have no title tags

More Examples

Case studies look at real-life experiments or businesses that have succeeded in using certain tactics or strategies. They’re effective because readers are more inclined to buy into information when it’s backed by proof.

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In this case study of fintech company Wise, we explored five reasons why its SEO strategy is so admirable:

Except of an Ahrefs article showing five reasons why Wise's SEO strategy is good

We also weaved in our product—the Ahrefs toolset—where we could.

Excerpt of an Ahrefs article talking about content optimization for featured snippets

For your case study to be effective, it has to give the reader some “wins”—clear takeaways that they can apply to their business. Ideally, you should feature a business that’s either well known or has a unique enough selling proposition to entice readers to click on the blog post.

Best practices

  • Give readers some clear takeaways (e.g., Oatly SEO Case Study: 5 Lessons You Can Learn From the Oat Drink Giant and Its IPO) so they’re more likely to read your blog post

9. Cheat sheets and checklists

Cheat sheets and checklists are essentially the same thing and may include a clear breakdown of the steps required to reach a goal.

Unlike how-to guides, which may sometimes be ambiguous in explaining how something works, checklists and cheat sheets are effective because they tell you exactly what you need to achieve something.

Here’s a concise SEO checklist we crafted for a blog post. We later repurposed the checklist as a tweet:

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In the above blog post, we shared that our SEO checklist helped grow our blog to over 640,000 monthly search visits. Then we shared that same checklist with users before going into a breakdown of each of the elements in the cheat sheet.

Best practices

  • Arrange your checklists/cheat sheets in chronological order so that the reader knows exactly how to reach a goal

Similar to what the name suggests, template blog posts include templates on how to achieve something—as in the case of this blog post on how to create a one-page marketing plan.

We recommend using this format:

  • What is [topic]?
  • Why is [topic] important?
  • How can I make [topic] work for me?
  • Template

You can share your template at the start of the article, which is what we normally do, or at the bottom of the blog post.

Excerpt of an Ahrefs article about a one-page marketing plan

There are also multiple ways to let readers access your template: We usually offer it as a free, copyable template (via Google Docs), but you may decide to create a downloadable template instead.

Best practices

  • Keep your template simple and organized, with guiding questions or tips for open-ended fields
Example of a simple and organized template

Final thoughts

These templates are not the be-all and end-all when it comes to writing a good blog post.

Try to mix things up depending on what you think works best. For instance, this guide to creating SEO-friendly URLs starts with a step-by-step guide, then looks at some best practices in a listicle format.

It’s all about experimenting and figuring out what your readers want, so don’t limit yourself.

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Have questions or comments? I’d love to hear them on Twitter



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How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages

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Compression can be used by search engines to detect low-quality pages. Although not widely known, it's useful foundational knowledge for SEO.

The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.

Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.

What Is Compressibility?

In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.

TL/DR Of Compression

Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.

This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:

  • Identify Patterns:
    A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases
  • Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
    The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size.
  • Shorter References Use Less Bits:
    The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.

A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.

Research Paper About Detecting Spam

This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.

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Marc Najork

One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.

Dennis Fetterly

Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.

Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.

Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis

Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.

Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.

Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:

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“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”

The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.

They write:

“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.

…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”

High Compressibility Correlates To Spam

The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.

Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.

The researchers concluded:

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“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”

But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:

“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.

Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:

95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.

More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”

The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.

Insight Into Quality Rankings

The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.

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The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.

The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.

This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:

“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.

For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”

So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.

Combining Multiple Signals

The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.

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The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:

“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”

These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:

“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”

Key Insight:

Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.

What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.

Takeaways

We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.

Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:

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  • Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
  • Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
  • Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
  • In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
  • When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
  • Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
  • Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.

Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:

Detecting spam web pages through content analysis

Featured Image by Shutterstock/pathdoc

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New Google Trends SEO Documentation

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Google publishes new documentation for how to use Google Trends for search marketing

Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.

The new guide has six sections:

  1. About Google Trends
  2. Tutorial on monitoring trends
  3. How to do keyword research with the tool
  4. How to prioritize content with Trends data
  5. How to use Google Trends for competitor research
  6. How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment

The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.

Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.

To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.

The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.

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Google explains:

“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”

Read the new Google Trends documentation:

Get started with Google Trends

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero

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All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

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All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

Hey all, I’m Rebekah and I am your Chosen One to “do a blog post for Ahrefs Evolve 2024”.

What does that entail exactly? I don’t know. In fact, Sam Oh asked me yesterday what the title of this post would be. “Is it like…Ahrefs Evolve 2024: Recap of day 1 and day 2…?” 

Even as I nodded, I couldn’t get over how absolutely boring that sounded. So I’m going to do THIS instead: a curation of all the best things YOU loved about Ahrefs’ first conference, lifted directly from X.

Let’s go!

OUR HUGE SCREEN

CONFERENCE VENUE ITSELF

It was recently named the best new skyscraper in the world, by the way.

 

OUR AMAZING SPEAKER LINEUP – SUPER INFORMATIVE, USEFUL TALKS!

 

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GREAT MUSIC

 

AMAZING GOODIES

 

SELFIE BATTLE

Some background: Tim and Sam have a challenge going on to see who can take the most number of selfies with all of you. Last I heard, Sam was winning – but there is room for a comeback yet!

 

THAT BELL

Everybody’s just waiting for this one.

 

STICKER WALL

AND, OF COURSE…ALL OF YOU!

 

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There’s a TON more content on LinkedIn – click here – but I have limited time to get this post up and can’t quite figure out how to embed LinkedIn posts so…let’s stop here for now. I’ll keep updating as we go along!



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