CINCINNATI -- If you were in a competition for “Best Blog”, where would you rank?  Not sure?  Check out the list below to see nine signs of a great business blog and see if it describes your blog.

1. Getting Started – You understand that the biggest hurdle to getting a blog posted is getting it started, so you dedicate some time in your schedule to write.
2. Personal – You’re not just reporting the facts, ma’am. You relate to your audience and write in a conversational tone. You use analogies and illustrations to explain what you mean. If you’re speaking to an audience in a particular geographic area, you reference specific things that they would understand. But above all, you don’t force it and you make sure to stay on topic.
3. Photos – You know that when people visit your blog, they don’t just want to see a wall of text because that’s the quickest way to incite a case of tl;dr (too long; didn’t read) and increase your bounce rate.  So to break it up and get people interested in what you have to say, you use at least one picture relevant to the content in every post and you include proper alt tags so that they’re found in search engines.
4. Keywords – You know what keywords you want to rank for in search engines, so you make sure to apply them in your blog posts in a way that fits with the flow of your post. When possible, you include them in the title of your post.
5. Content – You write content that’s relevant and engaging to the audience you’re trying to reach. You humanize yourself by including photos of activities and events in which your company is involved.
6. Consistent – Though it’s easy to put blogging on the backburner, you understand its importance and you are dedicated to a blogging schedule. You know that it’s good to establish a schedule of regularity when it comes to blogging so that your audience knows when to expect something new from you, and you don’t miss a deadline.
7. Links – Linkbuilding is a priority in your blogging strategy, so you make sure to link out to at least two different websites per blog post, and you prioritize links to those sites who are likely to link back to you.
8. Sharing – You’ve made it easy for your audience to share your blog posts with friends and co-workers by including social share buttons on every post. And you yourself make sure to share links to your articles via your own social networks.
9. Descriptions – You make sure to include a meta description (short summary of the content of the post) with every post so that when people come across your article on search engines or social networks, they know what it’s about.