23 Tips to Good Blogging. Part 2
This is part 2 of the series 23 Tips to Good Blogging.
Read 23 Tips to Good Blogging here.
11. RSS is must.
Do have an RSS feed for your blog. Feedburner is the best option to burn your blog feed. A tech savy reader always prefers to subscribe the feed of blog. You just can’t ignore this feed thing.
12. Place RSS button at right place.
Don’t slip the RSS button at the end of your page. Even providing it on your ‘About us’ page or on subscription page is not enough. Keep it in the side bar or some prime location of your blog. Instead of going for that single orange RSS button, you can provide buttons to some major RSS readers in the side bar of your blog. Also you can write a post about RSS, explaining what it means and how to use it and link it near the RSS button(s).
13. Offer email subscription of your blog.
Not everyone is comfortable with RSS. Give the option to get your blog feed through email to your readers. FeedBlitz is one such popular service which provides such service. Also ensure your readers that their email address will be 100% safe and their privacy will be maintained if they choose to subscribe the service.
14. Full feed or partial feed?
This is the question of your personal choice. You can provide an option of full feed with RSS ads supported in it, or can go for partial feed where readers will see the small snippet of your post and have to visit your blog to read the complete post. Choose whatever you feel better. You can also provide both options. Also if you are option for partial feed, make sure your readers click the link to read full post. Provide a snippet with good interest generating description.
15. Give relevant title to your post.
The title of your post should be very relevant to the content of it. A reader should get a complete idea of what the post is all about just by reading title of it. Don’t forget that title creates the first impression about the post, and that counts. Also use titles like ‘100 Adsense-tips’ rather than just ‘Adsense tips’. Such titles always perform better.
16. Create a better URL of your blogpost.
A good URL can help you a lot to rank better in search engines. Generally the post URL has format like http://www.blogURL.com/2007/02/10/blogpost_title. You can customize the blogpost_title part easily. Make sure you have your main post keyword is stuffed in the post title. Also avoid special characters like $ or % or = or & or + in the URL. Sometimes search engines spiders ignore the crawling of the pages whose URL contains these special characters.
17. Give proper credits.
If you are quoting someone else, do provide proper credits. You can also give the links to the posts form other blogs, which are similar to your blogpost. This will help your readers to get better information over the topic. And trust me, if your blog is helpful to a reader, he/she will automatically return to it.
18. Link smartly.
While providing a link in blogpost or side bar give good ‘Anchor text’. Suppose you are linking to someone’s post (or even you own post) about Adsense tips, then do not use text like click here or read it here. Instead use a descriptive text like ‘100 Adsense-tips’. Also you can use HTML tags like ‘target blank’ which opens the page in new window. Use such very wisely. You have to decide which page you want to get open in same window and which one in new window. Always remember that opening the link in same window will take the reader away from the current page. So be smart while linking.
19. Ping other sites.
Whenever you update your blog, don’t forget to ping the other sites like technorati, icerocket Feedburner etc. The option of automatic pinging is available in many blog hosting platforms like Wordpress and Movable type. You can also use the services like Pingoat and Ping-o-matic to ping various sites on the net.
20. Tag you post properly.
While posting on blog, always add your post to two to three relevant categories. Many search engines and services like technorati treats your categories as tags. Also adding technorati tags to your post is a good idea. Some nice technorati tags can bring a good deal of traffic to your blog. Don’t be over enthusiastic while tagging your post. Tag you post only with relevant tags. Over tagging may be considered as attempt to spam.
21. Provide bookmark options.
Your blogpost must have an easy option to bookmark by the readers. Create the options like ‘digg this post’, ‘add to del.icio.us’ or ‘Furl it’. Also you can provide the same options for your entire blog (i.e. homepage) in the side bar.
22. Interact with your readers.
Give a sincere and honest try to interact with your readers. After posting, just don’t sit back and wait for comments to flow in. Try to answer the readers’ comments. Sometimes a curious reader may like to mail you about some issue or some doubt, so give him/her an option to do so by providing your email id (do take some primary precautions while doing so).
23. Manage the comments.
It is always advisable to turn on the comments moderation in your blog posts. It means that comments will always be published in blogpost after the approval of blog owner. Don’t tolerate a spammy comments, or comments intended for the purpose of promoting some other blog or sites. If you are hosting a blog on your own domain and webspace, add nofollow tag in you comment space and declare it properly on your blog. This will discourage the backlinks obsessed commenters. You certainly don’t want Google and other search engines to look at you blog comments space full of spam.
Read 23 Tips tp Good Blogging. Part 1
Labels: Blogger tricks
