Generate More Traffic to Your Site with a Blog:
Blogging Basics
You've undoubtedly heard of Blogs, and may well have either read other peoples' Blogs or may even have a Blog of your own. What you may not realize is that a Blog can be a very powerful tool in terms of bolstering your internet presence and improving the indexing of your website.
What, then, is a Blog? This is a rather knotty question. Wikipedia defines it as: A weblog, which is usually shortened to blog, is a type of website where entries are made (such as in a journal or diary), displayed in a reverse chronological order. In effect it's an extension of the venerable practice of writing journals or diaries where the journal/diray is made immediately available on the Internet. Blogs often provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic.
As well as your RSS/Atom feed then having your own Blog can be a major boon both in terms of your overall web presence, getting additional pages from your website (especially deep pages) indexed, and providing you with an additional source of income. It can be a very useful tool in your internet arsenal but it is not an easy option. Like everything else, to do it well will take time and patience. However, believe me, the effort will be worthwhile, as I'll detail below.
Page Map |
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| Blogs and how to Create One: | Get Syndicated! |
| Blog and Ping | Join the Mailing List |
| Blog Directories |
What you need to know:
How to Create a Blog:
There are a number of tools that allow you to create your own blog (the one I use is Blogger which allows you to set-up your Blog, to alter the frame around your blog. This also allows you to publish your Blog to your own website (as well as generating Axom and RSS feeds for your blog [you can learn more about these on my news feeds page). At the moment, however, Blogger is suffering from the presents of several spam sites within their system and this is reducing the impact of the system as a whole. You may wish to use anther blog creator (but make certain that they have the services mentioned). For most of these Blog creation systems generating content is simply a matter of typing it in and then publishing your blog. You can usually upload images and use HTML tags to format your text.
The key thing here is content. It's important to either add unique content (written by you) or newsworthy stories to your blog in a timely fashion. Current thinking suggests that you post new content at least twice a week (preferrably more frequently) and if you don't have something like a real breaking story don't make your posts too short. Otherwise it may look like your Blog's little more than a spam blog. But you can write articles about the latest web developments, provide an overview of a particular niche market or provide reviews of affiliate products that you're promoting. You can also add commentaries on your own web pages or generate content that links in to pages on your site. The important thing here is that you're adding links to your own web pages from within the content that you're adding to your Blog. Essentially you want to include deep pages from your website in your Blog so that these will be indexed by the search engines.
You've now begun to 'tweak' your content to improve your indexing by search engines, but there's much more that you can do... For most of the Blog creation systems you can define the 'look and feel' of your Blog. For Blogger this is defined in the 'Template' tab at the top of your blog's editing page. This gives you a view of the template file that defines the 'look and feel' of your blog. It's written in CSS/XHTML and you can customize this file to do whatever you want. If you want to see some of the things I've done then take a look at my blog (which will open in a new window. The first thing to do is to brand your website with your own logo. You can then add advertising (such as with Google Adsense). I usually add one banner ad system to the top of the page and another to the left-hand navigation pannel. This pannel can also be used to promote some of your affiliate links or any web pages that you wand to promote. It can also be used to display a list of resources and important pages on your website (this is important as you can add deep links to your website here). All this is important as each time your Blog is archived this creates a new page containing all your links. As a result you will have multiple pages pointing to those pages that you've just specified in your website and as soon as the search engines find and begin to index your blog all those pages that you've linked to will suddenly appear in your site's index. You've now added a revenue stream (or several) to your Blog and you've added deep links into your website that will be indexed by the serach engines as soon as your Blog itself is indexed. But how do you ensure that your blog both gets read and indexed?
Blog and Ping
You may have come across 'blog and ping' systems out there on the web. They were all the rage in early 2005 but now (thankfully) are beginning to die a death. They work by using automatically-generated text (gleaned from other sites or article directories) to stuff a blog with text. This blog is then 'pinged' to a range of blog directories.
Pinging is a way of automatically telling the web directories that your blog has been updated. The problem with this system is that your blog looks like it's been artificially generated (which gets it banned from most web directories). You're also creating 'duplicate content' which may see your blog drop out of Google's listings. Your scam will also soon be identified by your human visitors who will not visit your blog or your links. You can try the 'blog and ping' approach if you want, but I prefer to keep my blogging 'honest'.
Which is not to say that one of the 'blog and ping' approaches: pinging weblogs to tell them that you've updated your blog isn't a worthwhile exercise. This process can get you instant listings (and if you've set-up your Blog correctly will also get a number of pages rapidly incorporated into the google index).
Once you've generated any new content for your Blog you need to let the main blog directories know that there's new content to look at. Two systems will automatically do this for you once you've filled-in some basic information and these are given below:
ping-o-matic
pingoat
The only problem with this approach is that your life in these directories is only transient and you will find that if you're not writing content very frequently you will soon drop out of the pinged directories (and you may well lose your Google listing for the pages linked by your blog). The only way to overcome this problem is to add your Blog to blog directories.
Blog Directories:
Like all other forms of web content you will need to add your Blog to blog directories. One great resource is RSSTop55, a list of almost 185 Blog and RSS listing/aggregation site. It's well worth your time working through this list and adding your Blog/RSS/Atom feeds to the appropriate directories (about 5% of the links are currently dead, but don't let this put you off).
What you need to remember is that your Blog is just like any other web page. To be indexed it needs sufficient in-bound links (IBLs) that the search engines reckon it's worth indexing the content of your blog. The easiest way of achieving this is to have a number of sites linking to yours. This is why joining as many of the Blog directories in the link above as possible is vitally important. However, don't submit your blog to these directories too early. Many will need you to have been an active blogger for six months before your blog's included. Others will need you to have sufficient content for it to be worthwhile including your blog in their listings. So, start out on your blog, add content at least twice a week, ping the main blog aggregators and then when about four months have gone by start submittin your blogs to the blog lists.
Get Syndicated!
Some sites where you can submit your blog only take feeds rather than the human-readable version of your Blog. As a result it's vitally improtant to also export your blog in at least RSS 2.0 format. The process of making your RSS feed available is known as Syndication. You can then also submit your blog not only to the blog indexes but also to RSS aggregation and syndication sites; greatly improving your exposure.
If you've followed the instructoins going here then not only will you have a Blog that's worth reading, but you will also have a valuable resource that will generate a trickle income for you and which will also help with the indexing of your main site(s). It may take a while for your Blog to mature sufficiently for it to be worth indexing, but it's something that's definitely worth doing.
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