What Makes A good Blog
To build a good blog you need to know what makes a good blog, and a good way to get some instant tips is by performing searches and researching the first blogs that appear in google. If you know of any popular blogs or successful blogs then start off by doing research on them first, for example I’m in the seo field so I often stop by at Matt Cutts blog. I suppose Matt Cutts Blog is bad example to use as he is one of the big names for google and if you own a website you should be following him anyway.
What makes a good blog is one that ranks well for many terms and is primarily based on one subject. The layout is also another important factor as you want to try and keep your visitors on your site for as long as you can. Attractive blogs with well thought out navigation can have a bigger impact on your website than you might think, for example I came a cross a blog the other day that appeared at the top for the term I searched for, when I got to the blog and read the post I thought it was well written and very informative so I wanted to explore the blog and read other posts, but the blog owner had a terrible sidebar and navigation, it didn’t have links to categories or other posts so I couldn’t explore the site and left pretty quickly.
Sometimes you need to weigh up seo with appearance, I don’t know why this particular website owner decided to hide his link, but sometimes people add a no-follow tag to there categories and tags to prevent duplicate content.
The way to keep people on your site longer is to provide them with really good and unique content. Writing interesting articles and having a good navigational system is a big help, a good way to get visitors to view more pages is by cross linking article that relate to the one there reading. Good content doesn’t necessarily have to be articles, you could offer free services or software or even give something away, but having articles is a good way to produce a wide range of traffic targeted at your niche.
Also don’t overload your pages with articles, I suggest displaying about 3 articles per page depending on how many words you write. If you only write about 200-250 words per article then you might want to display about 5 articles on each page, but if your like me and write 500+ words then its best to display about 3 articles per page. This is done for two reasons, the first reason is to not overload your viewers with content and the second is to not overload google. Its not known how much of each page gets crawled by google, but we know its a lot more than what it used to be several years ago.