Important Don't forget your 1 featured image -

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Last Updated on November 4, 2021 by Scott Charleboix

In today’s post, “Important! Don’t forget your 1 featured image” I’m going to share with you a good habit that as a new blogger you take into consideration ASAP. Which is don’t forget to add your “featured image.”

Don’t forget your 1 featured image

And to add to that one item you should add to your checklist before publishing your post is to add a Meta Description.

At the current time (June 12th, 2021) I have 20 pins that don’t have any social shares. That’s not too bad of odds considering that overall I have 218 total posts.

Don't forget your 1 featured image. Developing Blogging Good Habits

All too often I pour a lot of energy into a post, do my research, check to ensure that the post has good spelling and no grammatical errors. Chances are good that you too may want to fall into the same trap that probably a lot of other bloggers do which is to publish your post. And then say to yourself that you’ll add your pins the next day or so.

What tends to happen is that if you do this too often you’ll have posts that people won’t know exist because you’re not fully promoting them by adding a featured image and then adding that featured image to your Pinterest account.

To illustrate how this can increase your blog’s traffic we’ll look at exclusively at the metric of social shares.

By the simple act of adding a featured image to “every” post on my blog and that pinning that featured image to a relevant post, my social shares increased to 142 shares for 17 different posts averaging to almost 9 social shares per post.

To recap, when your done with your post make a habit of adding at least one pin as your featured image. You can always come back to the post later to add more pins. But by leaving it blank you’re just hurting yourself.

I really love Pinterest pins; however, the recommended size of Pinterest pins is 1,000 x 1,500 pixels and they don’t work well if you use them as featured images within your blog. What will happen is that the top of the image and some of the bottom of the image will cut out of the picture.

Therefore, the recommendation that I read that you should use for your featured images is 1,200 x 628 pixels. Then again, with that setting it’s probably best not to use text within your featured image unless you place it well within the picture.

Right now I’m in the middle of updating a majority of my featured images for my posts so that the text is clearly visible when you go to see the blog posts that are available on my website, PinArtwork.

I normally try to have at least 10 pins for each of my blog posts. I’m normally tempted that I want to publish my post to let everyone know it’s good content. But the history shows that if there’s not at least one featured image the blog post isn’t getting any traffic.

Heeding my own advice, I’m just going to develop one pin for this post and then I’ll come back to make the other 9 or 10 pins. As of the current moment, I’m using the Rank Math Pro SEO plug-in to review my posts that have a good score (less than or equal to 80) and I’m trying to improve them to better than 81 so that they fall into the Good criteria (green).

While reviewing this post, I noticed that I had identified that I was going to add some more pins to it; however, I never got around to providing pins for this post. Since I’m right in the middle of optimizing my posts, I’m going to fully optimize this post including taking the time to provide some new images for it. That way I’ll be able to provide a good featured image for this post, optimize it for SEO, have a better SEO score, and be able to promote this post some more with fresh new pins.

If your a new blogger and if you want to develop other good habits I highly suggest that you subscribe to my blog and my free gift to you is an Excel SEO Audit Checklist that you can use to optimize your blog post or your website.

Between using my recommended SEO Audit checklist and the Rank Math plug-in that has a free and premium version your well on your way to optimizing your blog to grow it’s traffic. Yoast SEO is a good program to learn about SEO but it’s emphasis isn’t on the keywords like Rank Math uses to promote your SEO. I used Yoast Premium SEO for over a year and there’s a night and day difference between the two programs. I don’t have an affiliate program with Rank Math, I simply highly recommend it so that you’re part of the 1 million people that have subscribed to the Rank Math plug-in and growing.