Optimising Your Blog

I was asked today how you get started in blogging - is it enough just to dash off a few ideas and hit publish? Well here are a few things, apart from actually writing, that I believe will help you get started.

The assumption is that you don’t just want to write your thoughts into a vacuum. The main point of blogging is to take part in an online conversation with other people in your field. You may have lots of reasons for wanting to do this, but most professionals understand the importance of networking.

Find out who else is writing in your area. This means doing so searching around using the leading blog search engine, Technorati.

Get Google Reader. The art of blogging is to link to other bloggers - so you plug into the online conversation and build your network - to do that you have to read other blogs. How do you follow lots and lots of blogs when you have hardly time to read the newspaper? Simple get yourself an RSS Reader and subscribe to their feeds. That way you can read all the blogs in one place. Google Reader is probably the one these days.

Burn your feed with Feedburner. Feedburner makes your feed easy to subscribe to - so rout your feed through it. You will also find a host of useful stats and online tools come with feedburner.

Make your feed easy to find These days browsers auto discover RSS feeds - so make sure that the header of your blog points to your new Feedburner feed.

Get on top of categories and tagging Categories and tagging make your blog easy to navigate, they also help put your posts into the general mix of other blog posts on similar subjects. People will find you in places like Technorati. A good idea for WordPress bloggers is to get the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin.

Make your archives friendly In a similar vein to tagging, people will stay with your site better if they can naviate your achrives well. WordPress users should consider the Extended Live Archives plugin.

Fend off comment spam This is partly about making sure that the settings of your blog do not allow people to dump loads of links in a comment, and its also about getting some good anti-spam tools such as Akismet.

Make Your Blog Google Friendly Again a plugin comes to the rescue - Google site maps which helps Google find all your pages, but it’s also about making sure that your blog follows some basic Search Engine Tips, which I’m going to write up soon.

Monitor Traffic You are soon going to want to know all about your visitors. There are an array of tools to help you including sitemeter, Google analytics, and Google for webmasters.

There is more, much more I could write here - but I think that’s a enough tips for now. I’ve got to get on with optimising a blog for a client - and as you can see, it’s rather time consuming.

This entry was posted on January 17th, 2007 and is filed under Blog Home, Blog Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.