Better Blogging
Last night as I lay trying to fall asleep, I decided I would rewrite the more important portions of yesterday’s blog posting in an effort to make it more useful and effective.
Some people are obsessed with the popularity of their blog, trying to acquire an ever higher Technorati ranking. As a result a lot gets written on how to make a blog more popular. I don’t think popularity should be the reason you do anything, especially writing. However if you do want to improve your writing, specifically your blog postings I’ve given the matter some thought and am happy to pass on my advice.
The two most important qualities to strive for are:
- Timelessness
- Timeliness
A posting has timelessness if once published it will remain relevant for an extremely long time, ideally forever. If you can achieve this with a blog posting it will rank well in the search engines for a variety of keywords and continue to be read for as long as it remains online.
A posting has timeliness if once published it becomes the first or amongst the very earliest writings online to discuss a particular issue, event, or subject. This is the proverbial scoop from traditional journalism. If you can achieve this with a blog posting you will get a sudden increase in traffic and possibly several trackbacks and regular readers.
A third quality to strive for and one which will take more than a single posting is being authoritative. To achieve this it really helps if your blog is focused on a single topic or a very small range of topics unlike this one. In an effort to maintain focus you can have multiple blogs, use subdomains, or rely on tags and your blog software to bring further focus to your writing. If you can become an established authority on a subject as determined by Google you will continue to attract more readers and incoming links through dominance of the search engine rankings.
If you really want to improve your blogging, particularly how it performs in the various search engines you should also pay attention to the following:
- title a well chosen title which includes relevant keywords but also entices potential readers to click on it is the most important words in every blog posting.
- quality control proofread, spell check, verify links, make corrections, update the information through comments or follow up postings.
- link no webpage is an island, link to other sites of authority and potential interest to your readers, it may attract reciprocal links and will likely improve your search engine rankings.
- participate it is called the blogosphere and the world wide web for a reason, respond to comments and actively comment on other people’s blogs.
- scanability is the ability of a reader to quickly scan your posting looking for the exact information they want. This is extremely important online and is achieved by using bold text, italics, subtitles, bullet points and other aspects of typography.
If you are interested in further tips on improving your blog and your writing in general there is a lot of advice online though it can be a bit repetitive. I’ve provided links to a few more articles at the bottom of this posting but the best way to get better at anything is practice. However if you want to become a better writer, it helps if you become a better reader, this involves taking the time and effort to read more challenging authors and a wide range of subject matter and styles of writing.
This entry was posted on Thursday, August 3rd, 2006 at 11:39 am filed under: Blogging. 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.
