Build a Better Blog - What’s in a Blog?
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Blogs, short for Web logs, started out on the Internet largely as personal diaries. Casual and friendly in tone, blogs are meant for short pieces of content (generally in the 300-word range) which appear frequently and get updated often. These days, many, many different types of Web sites use blogs to bring in continually fresh content. Blogs no longer have to be personal diaries, but can be on any subject or no specific subject at all.
To build a better blog, do some research online. Look to the most popular and widely-read blogs out there. These are the sites which are doing something correctly - and there’s no reason you can’t learn how to do the same for your own pages.
As ranked by Technorati, http://technorati.com/, the most popular blog in the world is Boing Boing (pictured above). Offering snippets of news, personal anecdotes and plenty of eye candy, this blog gives visitors a lot of different content and a good many ways to pass the time online.
Blogs are, above all, about content. Your blog should provide a good deal of content that’s updated often - once a week if not more. Make sure the content is somewhat short and easy to read, simple to understand. Most Internet users do not read above an eighth-grade level of education, so be sure your content remains accessible to the public by keeping your language simple, straightforward and easy to read. Your content is truly the backbone of your blog, and you should put your efforts into making that content fresh, interesting and appealing to your traffic.
SEO Still Counts
Don’t forget that search engine optimization, SEO, is every bit as important for blogs as it is for any other Web page. Every piece of content on your blog should contain a keyword-focused headline and key phrases which are repeated throughout the piece. Make key phrases short and simple and search-engine focused; remember that people won’t find your blog if the search engines can’t locate your pages.
It’s a good idea to build every piece of content around two key phrases, which are repeated several times throughout the content in question (at least more than twice). Don’t repeat too often, however, as saturating your content with keywords could make it hard to read.
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