Ten Tips for Better Blogging

1. Stay on topic. Pick a topic for your blog and pretty much stick to it. I mean you can deviate a bit, but people want to know what to expect from your blog so try and give them what they come to you for. Put yourself in the shoes of your users and deliver the goods. You can write down your major category names and then think up posts ideas for each category. Use the list to write from or to research the ideas for posts as you have time.
2. Present your ideas with visuals. Blog posts are mush easier and more pleasant to read when they include photos, illustrations or videos. Try and use the same size photos and generally the same placement so your readers don’t get seasick scrolling down the page. Remember to check the licensing when you use photos or art work that you did not produce.
3. Keep posts short and to the point. If it is a longer “how to” article then use the “read more” to present only an excerpt so people do not have to scroll through the entire article if they are not interested in it.
4. Think through your categories. This should not be an index of everything and the kitchen sink. It should give readers an idea of the general type of posts that will be presented in each area. This is a better way for readers to find what you have written about than to include archives by month and date. Keep the archives on a separate index page if you must have one.
5. Don’t put posts in multiple categories. This creates a big mess. When you write a post make a decision as to where it goes and put it there. You can change it later if you need to. Think chapters in a book. Each thing goes into one chapter. Not only is it annoying to see the posts in every category, search engines think you are putting the same content multiple times on your blog which they do not like.   It is a good idea to check into the DO Not Follow plugins anyway since even categorizing posts and the blog page can confuse the search engines into thinking that you are duplicating content and they don’t like that.
6. Link a lot. Search engines love links and they boost your Google ranking. Link to other people, places and things that you mention in your posts as well as to other blogs posts. It is not considered good etiquette to ask other bloggers to link to you. Make them interested enough by good content or making relevant comments on their posts that they will want to link to you.
7. Use ordered and unordered lists and use headlines liberally. The bots and spiders that crawl the web for content love the use of links and headings. Only use the heading 1 for the Blog Title but then go down from there. These things help them navigate. Flash stops them dead in their tracks. So if you have paid oodles of dollars for a flash website that is not getting good rankings, this may be why. Add a blog component to your site and reduce the number of flash pages.
8. Make your blog post headlines unambiguous. Newspaper headlines are often very short and pithy. Magazines can get away with outrageous article titles that make you want to read more to find out what the story is about, but search engines and RSS feeds work better when the subject of the post is clearly or even somewhat indicated by the post title.
9. Include a list of related posts under each article. You can point readers to other posts that are on the same subject and thus increase page views on your blog. There are Plugins that can do this for you automatically.
10. Write in your own voice. Be yourself. You don’t have to reveal a lot about yourself but a glimpse or two gives the reader an idea of who you are and that makes your blog more accessible. People like to know the background and the details so don’t make them beg.

Tagged as: blogs