Successful Blogging

There are many reasons why one might blog: such as voicing one’s own opinion, political reasons and so forth. Another less-obvious reason is that creating a blog may catch Google’s attention because it refreshes your website with new content on a consistent basis. Google gives a better rank to active websites and it doesn’t appreciate static websites.

Where your blog can be posted/published: If you don’t already have your own web site, many blogging services are available online. Blogger and WordPress are two of the most used applications. Yahoo.com has also started getting some of the action in blogging. You can insert a blog on your pre-existing website, which is a fairly common practice. It would be similar to mydomain.tld/blog/

Software: WordPress is a great tool for your blog if you already have a hosted website up and running. Blogger also has a facility where your articles can be drafted in Blogger and uploaded to your own site through a click of a link (Once the FTP information is entered).

Content: Original blog entries (your own words, not copied from others — an exception to this rule is when you use a brief excerpt from someone’s article), and current information with engaging content are all essential in making your blog effective.

Reader interaction: You can let readers leave feedback by setting your blog to allow it. This gives you control over your blog and comments. This facility is necessary to protect you from current and future spammers. In addition, those who disagree with your opinions may post unsuitable comments.

Ensure you have visibility for your blog:

1) Make sure that the blog content is original and fresh

2) have links from other sites,

a.) Become a member of a webring

b.) partake in social networking (Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc.),

c.) Look for forums that have similar interests as you do. It is possible to find forum communities at places like Yahoo, Yuku and Aimoo, among others.

3) Submit your URL to Google and Yahoo. If you utilize WordPress, you can download an XML Sitemap generator plug-in (it does not cost anything, but donations are appreciated.)

4) “Tags” in your content are a must. Web crawlers like Google will know how to categorize your blog articles when you put keywords in the tags (H1 tags, Title tags, etc.)