You work hard to create content – sometimes on the fly in the midst of the raging storm that is entrepreneurialism.

In the rush to get the thing out though you can diminish its impact through oversight and sloppiness. You might even do your brand more harm than good. And then all that hard work has less payoff.

Use this sixteen-point checklist as a guide to help establish a pre-publish blog post/page routine so you can hit publish with incredible confidence.

☐ Keywords – Do you have a plan for optimizing certain keywords and phrases as the focus for this post? (Yoast SEO Plugin helps analyze if you’ve used these phrases in the right amount.)

☐ Grammar and Spelling – Have you proofed your post to catch typos and embarrassing grammar missteps? (Check out Grammarly – it will check you as you go.)

☐ Headline – Have you spent time writing an appealing headline? Use strong adjectives and action packed benefit statements.

☐ Hook – Does your first paragraph draw the reader into the payoff even if you spend the next ten paragraphs setting it up?

☐ H2, H3 – Have you made your post scannable by breaking it into subsections and lists with H2 and H3 formatting to help with readership and let Google know what’s important?

☐ Permalink – Have you changed your permalink to include your keyword rather than simply use the default permalink post title?

☐ Links – Have you looked for ways to link internally to related posts or externally to resources that add value? Have you used keywords in the anchor texts of these links?

☐ Category – Have you chosen an appropriate category that matches up with your core themes? Categories can help organize and produce their own feed to use in other ways.

☐ Tags – Have you tagged the content to include people, things or resources you’ve mentioned?

☐ Featured Image – Have you included a compelling image and chosen it as your featured image? The image in this post was created using Canva.

☐ Image alt attribute – Have you written an alt attribute to describe your image in terms of your keywords?

☐ Title – Have you written a title attribute that uses your keywords? (This is a feature of a good plugin such as WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast.)

☐ Meta Description – Have you written a description that might entice someone to click through if they read it in search engine results? (Again Yoast)

☐ Author – Have you chosen the correct author if you have multiple authors for the blog?

☐ Preview – Have you looked at a live preview just to make sure everything is as it should be?

☐ Publish – Have you hit the publish button?

Okay, now go out there and promote the heck out of your perfect post!