What is a blog?
A blog is basically a website but they tend to be used more for information and discussions. They are designed in a way that allow people to post articles on any topic and then let people comment on what they have written.
Blogs are popular because generally they are easy to set up and manage.
You can either go with an online service or download software to your own hosting and set up your blog software on your own domain.
One example of blogging software is www.blogger.com which is an online service. Another is WordPress which offers both an online service and a software download. Personally I prefer the software download version but you need to be aware that you need to create a database on your hosting account to set this up.
Drive traffic to your Blog
In my view your blog should be based around a niche rather than have topics that are unrelated. For example our blog covers SEO, blogging, website design and social media. These topics are all related to each other and compliment each other. By building up your blog in this way each post helps to push up your other posts which in turn drives new visitors to your blog.
Building a reputation for your blog is done by slowly adding relevant quality posts to your blog. Matt Cutts from Google talks about the Katamari effect of slowly building up your blog. Don’t try to publish tonnes of rubbish posts, build slowly with quality and relevant posts and your blog will grow into a monster blog in time!
Some SEO tips for your Blog
- At least make it look like you have put a bit of effort in change the default template!
- Avoid paid posts
- Keep your blog software up to date. The security of your blog is very important. If someone hacks your site and puts loads of hidden links to non relevant sites you are going to get penalised or even banned off search engines. You can also get penalised if your website gets infected with malware.
- Check your statistics for opportunities. Things you should look for are keywords appearing in your stats that you are not targeting. Look for 404 errors and either redirect these to current pages or recreate the missing page.
- Bounce rates are also important. Some one visiting a page on your website and then leaving without visiting any other page gives the search engines a signal that your website isn’t very interesting. Add images and video to make the page interesting. Add related articles to the page so that people can easily visit similar pages to the one that brought them to your blog in the first place
- Make sure you use good titles for your posts and categories.
- Use good page names. For example we are based in Barnsley and get a lot of local work in Barnsley and have therefore created a page to help us to target this area
- Make your posts funny or interesting
- Write frequently. Don’t write 3 or 4 articles and then think you are done. Try to write a few articles every week.
- Don’t take short cuts.
- Look out for new topics to write about.
- Use lists. People love lists.
An RSS feed is also a good way to attract inbound links to your blog or give it fresh content from other sites.
Using social media is a great way to let people know about your fresh content. I recently found totally me which lets you link all your social accounts into one.
Most of all enjoy your blogging. If you are happy writing your blog posts this will come across to your readers.