There are a lot of reasons to blog, including voicing your opinions, doing a public service, and more. A more “insidious” motivation to start a blog is to make an impression on Google, providing updated content to your site continuously (not to say there is anything wrong with romancing Google!) This is because Google does not look favorably upon static websites and gives higher ranks to those which are updated more actively.
Locations to post/publish your Blog: There are multiple services available on the Internet for those who don’t already have a blog. WordPress.com and Blogger.com are two of the most popular ones. Yahoo.com as well, has begun to obtain a chunk of the blog pie. A traditional practice is to install your blog in a folder titled “blog” on your site, assuming you already have a website. It may look like: 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: It is possible to arrange your blog so that it permits viewers to provide feedback. When you do this, you can moderate your blog by setting it up to accept or block posted comments. This feature is necessary since as soon as spammers discover your blog, you’ll have to put up with their spam. You could also be targeted by trolls or people who disagree with you.
Making your blog visible:
1) Make sure that the blog content is original and fresh
2) Backlinks to other sites
a.) Become a member of a webring
b.) partake in social networking (Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc.),
c.) join forums that have the same types of interest as your site. Forums, or communities, can be found at “Multiply”, Aimoo, Google, and many more.
3) Submit your URL address to Google and Yahoo. WordPress has a plug-in for XML sitemap generators that can be downloaded for free (although they accept donations — they are very polite about it.)
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.)
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