Taking Your Blog To The Next Level

Thanks to everyone who came out to the ‘Taking Your Blog To The Next Level’ advanced lab segment at Blogher ‘07! I really felt like we had a great session and were able to address some common CSS questions and design issues. I hope everyone who attended felt the same.

If you missed it, you can check out some of the things we covered on a mini-site I threw together for our session located here:  blogher.squarespace.com.

I’ll be adding tutorials and tips to the site based on feedback from attendees and readers. Be sure to subscribe to email notifications and we’ll let you know when the site is updated!

Managing Blogs and Increasing Traffic

What would you give for a smoothly running blog with a ton of visitors? A few may be lucky enough to have this already and a few might not be looking for this, but for most it is the holy grail of blogging. You’ve seen it happen to other blogs but it may not always be clear how to achieve it yourself. Fortunately, there are a lot of little things you can do to streamline the blogging process and boost your results. And all the little things added together can lead to dramatic improvements on your overall blog. So for the busy person with little spare time, what are 10 quick things you can do to improve your blog if you haven’t already? I’m glad you asked.

1. Make your next post either a “how to” or a list of tips. These have a better chance of someone linking to it or adding it to a social bookmarking site. There are lots of things you already know how to do, so pick one and share your knowledge.

2. Sign up for the blog directory sites. There are a ton of them out there and they have some decent link authority. Some ask for a link in return, but others ask for nothing at all. Check out Blog Catalog or Bloggernity for a place to start.

3. Add a search feature for your blog. Squarespace makes it easy and your readers will thank you.

4. Take a look through your sidebars and see what you can clean up. Blogrolls full of blogs you don’t read anymore and other sidebar additions may be detracting from your message.

5. Ping sites about your latest post to get an extra boost. Squarespace has an internal ping distributon mechanism that can be used to ping the biggest blogging site trackers. For those who might want to ping smaller servies, a program like PingShot can help you out.

6. Take a few minutes to create a blog editorial calendar. Figuring out what to write about now will save you time later. Copy Blogger has some good title ideas if you’re stuck.

7. Add a picture. It won’t take long to add an image and it will make your post more noticeable. There are lots of sites out there with free clip art and if you’re looking for free stock photos, visit this Graphics n’ Graphic Design post.

8. Add one more call to action. It may be clear to you what you would like your blog reader to do, but it may not always be so obvious to them. A little reiteration can go a long way.

9. Put your blog URL in your preset email signature. That way you continue to spread the word automatically and it also is seen by anyone your emails are forwarded to.

10. Sign up for Technorati, claim your blog, and make sure you tag it to the appropriate topics. This is one way that you can have control on how searchers are finding your content and Technorati is a top blog search engine.

SEO Friendly Blogging

The good news about blogging is that it has a distinct advantage in search engines. That said, there are always steps you can take to ensure that you come up a little higher in search results and therefore snag a little more traffic. Use the natural advantages that blogging offers and play off of these strengths to do even better. All it takes is knowing what to look for.

First of all, you will have the advantage of speed just by blogging or using a content management system (CMS) instead of manually developing webpages and having to upload files or worry about maintaining links. Having a friction-free publishing environment is important because Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask take the frequency of website updates into account. You will find that results for a blog tend to show up in search results faster than a static page. The downside is that these posts may disappear from the results after a while, especially on competitive terms — because most blogs only show the most recent posts on their front page. The advantage of Squarespace is that our platform is like both blogging and a CMS, whereby you can also create categories and static pages that link back to your favorite posts. This helps you build your own niche subject when you post fairly regularly.

Second, pay special attention to your titles (i.e., headlines). This is really the most important part of your post and it can be a very careful balancing act. You want to make the title interesting enough that people are interested in clicking the link and reading your thoughts, but it must also include the kind of generic terms people will search under to find information about your topic. What keywords do you want to work in? It may help to make a list of these important terms and keep them on hand when you are blogging.

Just taking these two easy steps in mind, search engine results can increase dramatically. It just takes a little planning. Fortunately, with Squarespace, most of the work is done for you. All you need to concentrate on is the writing and you can quickly make your blog very SEO friendly.