I’ve been asked to share some tips on blogging best practices.

I’m not an expert on blogging, but I do love it, and I pay attention to SEO, and so here is a kind of combined list of best practices for SEO and the writing of blogs:

1. Post regularly. People get frustrated when they come back to a blog that hasn’t been updated in awhile and eventually they may stop returning. (I’m better on this topic with my personal blog).
2. Write descriptive blog titles that have search keywords in them. The title is very important.
3. I like wordpress.com because you can tag your posts with words that will give you links from high PageRank “list pages“.
4. Blogs are like tapas (follow link for description of why).
5. URL handling - have the title of the blog be the file name: tips-on-blogging-best-paractices/.  Yea, I know I don’t do this on my search blog, but I do on my personal one.
6. Beware of blog spam. Set the “comments” rule to require approval before a comment is posted. It’s amazing how many robots are created to spam blogs.
7. Create a blogroll that is extensive and useful (on my to-do list). It’s good for the reader and good karma for the blogosphere.
8. Consider placing a link to your blog in the signature of your email.
9. Take your blog seriously. There are so many blogs in the world. Everyone has a domain expertise - know yours and do your best to share your insights.
10. Create categories for your blog subject matter. For instance, I should have more, like one on usability, PageRank, link acquisition, analytics, etc. I’ve done a much better job of this on my personal blog and will get around to fixing this one.
11. Use images as much as you can. People like visual cues (again, I am better at this on my personal blog).
12. Look at your blog stats. Which posts are bringing in people through SEO? Are others linking to you? Being aware of how people find your blog enables you to invest in what is working.
13. List your blog with blog directories.
14. Allow tracebacks and pings; be mindful of spam.
15. Be succinct. (see the “blogs are like tapas” link)
16. Hosting - I have one blog on wordpress.com and another on redbricksmedia.com. Hosting with wordpress (or another service) allows for automatic software updates and more internal linking from tag list pages.
17. Don’t sell links unless you want to be a professional blogger. I find blogs with paid links to, ironically, look less professional.
18. If you are going to sell links, don’t sell SEO links. This can get you in trouble with Google. Use either Google or Yahoo’s paid links service which is client side and therefore, safe, from a SEO point of view.
19. Give link love to those who deserve it.
20. Do not allow RSS feeds of your full blog posts (only title and snippet). Scraper sites WILL hijack your postings (this happened to me).
21. Do it because you love it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 3rd, 2007 at 7:39 pm and is filed under Search. 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.