Edit Your Content: A Checklist of 12 Things Not to Miss

Here's a checklist for rereading your content before you publish. For anything important, i.e. that's being sold or delivered to clients, I use Barbara Feiner, a professional editor. She not only corrects errors, but evaluates for clarity and flow.

But for blog posts and everyday content creation, I put on my editor's visor and those green sleeve thingys, and act like a detached newspaper editor with a red pencil. Here's what I look for:

1. Common typos like theirs for there's, your for you're, that or which for who, and all those pesky things a spell check won't pick up.
2. Grammar goofs: My most common are when the verb doesn't agree with the noun, as in "Here's my mistakes..."
3. Review for commas, semi-colons, ellipses and em dashes. The important thing is for it to read well, read clearly. Helps to read it out loud.
4. Review for paragraph and line spacing, since I like to break up long blocks of text.
5. Review for bolded words and insert subheadings where needed.
6. Separate a blog post after 2-3 paragraphs so that it goes to the extended post feature ("read more..."

7. Review for external link opportunities. I always link to a person's name (to a page on the web where you can learn more about them), to a book, or to a Wikipedia definition when useful. This is really important for building relationships with the people you respect.

8. Review for internal link opportunities. Surely you've already written more than once about something; you should link the keywords to that post on  your own blog or site. (Post note: I forgot to do this on this post. It's never too late to edit a post, and link to your own stuff.)

9. Review for eye-candy: Where would an interesting photo clip add interest to your blog post? I always start a post with a photo, usually from iStockPhoto.com.

10. Review for keywords. Do you make it easy for search engines to know what this is about? Come on, help the poor little spiders out, they're not exactly geniuses.

11. Review your headline for how compelling it is. Does it draw the reader into the post to learn more? Is it keyword-rich?

12. What else? You tell me: what other things do you check for before you hit the publish button? Hit the comment link and leave me your ideas.

Comments

[Patsi aka The Blog Squad]

This is funny because I actually got distracted and forgot to edit before publishing! I'm going back in...

[Janet Hilts MPH, EFT-ADV]

Thanks for this concise list, Patsi. It's so easy to get in a hurry and miss some of these important components.

[Jenny Pilley]

Excellent list. It is so important to know what to look for when checking work and what not to miss, because it is sometimes the vital elements that slip through the net.

[Patsi aka The Blog Squad]

Janet, Jenny, thanks for stopping by. I think probably the most important thing not to miss and linking to your own internal content.

By the time someone has been blogging for some time, you've probably got a whole warehouse of valuable content.

But it takes time to go search out your previous posts and link to them. But just think how valuable that is.

1. Readers stay longer and get to know you better.
2. SEO value for page ranking.

Hmmm, worthy of another new post, me thinks!