Tim & Anthony here. We thought we would have a chat today about blogging and look at some of the finer details.

Blogging can be a fantastic way to get more traffic charging full speed to your website plus it’s ideal for sharing information (like we are doing with you right now

The good news is that setting up a Blog for your website is surprisingly easy these days but there are a few caveats and things you need to change to ensure your blog is setup correctly to get maximum exposure in the search engines.

But don’t let the ease of set up fool you. There are some things you need to get right!

Before we start getting into the do’s and don’ts of Blogs, let’s actually define what a Blog is.

A Blog can be thought of as a simple, public online diary where you can write entries (posts) into the diary.

Being public, the posts can be viewed by anyone who happens to surf by your site, and hopefully you have lots and lots of people reading every post you make, and contributing to your Blog in the form of adding comments, looking at relevant links you add to your blog, watching audio and video, and hopefully linking to your blog from their websites.

What is particularly attractive about Blogs, is that the entire process of Blogging is very simple to do, mainly due to the great quality of Blog software available that you can install on your website.

Decent Blogging software provides all the functionality you need, the management of posts by yourself (and others), the categorization of posts (something that is essential) and even the process of telling other blogging websites every time you make a new post.

Automatically telling other sites about your posts is a huge plus since it’s getting your blog out there, and of course your comments and information, thus putting your content in front of many people, many who may not have been aware previously of your website.

Now one of the most important things to ensure is that you don’t just use the Blog as a sales page (we generally recommend you leave the selling of your products and services to your actual sales page on your website).

Obviously you will want to talk about your products and services, and the benefits visitors will get in using them, but we believe it’s important not to have an all out sales pitch, as that will tend to turn off visitors who may be seeing your message for the first time.

We also recommend you talk about non-business stuff, information about you, the person, some of your interests, things you have found of interest on the Internet, etc.

Getting to know the real you.

When people read these personal posts, they get to know the real you, and form a relationship with a “real person” and not a nameless website, and this can only assist you in future sales with these people.

A Blog also allows (and in fact encourages) participation by visitors, who can post responses to your entries, and this is often a great way to stimulate interesting conversations.

Good Blogging software will allow you to remove spam responses (where visitors or programs “write” messages directing people to their site) as well as to moderate conversations that are in appropriate or off-topic.

One of the best reasons to use Blogs is to help you rank highly in the search engines.

The search engines love Blogs, provided they are providing relevant and quality content.

To give you an idea of how important search engines see Blogs, Google bought one of the largest Blogging sites out there (blogger.com).  Having a focused relevant site with interesting and useful content can only help you in your journey to find true search engine love.

Provide decent content

We are always preaching about providing relevant content. It’s no different with Blogs, you need to ensure all content  is relevant, and ensure your separate your posts into logical categories.

For example if you have a website about software development, you may make posts discussing programming generally, other posts about training for software developers, and more posts about a specific computer language like Java.

It’s vitally important that you don’t just lump all posts together for a number of reasons.

Firstly, people coming to your Blog may have a specific interest in some of your posts (training for example) and may find it hard and frustrating to easily find all posts you have written on training if you have not clearly defined categories (and allowed posts to be searched/sorted by these categories).

Likewise the search engines may view your Blog as less relevant if you lump all your posts together than another Blog elsewhere that has posts clearly defined in categories.

Search engines very much prefer categorization of information and reward websites that categorize correctly with high search engine rankings.

Luckily being able to put your posts in specific categories is quite easy.  Literally at the press of a button you can assign posts to one (or more) categories making it simple for your readers and search engines to find posts of related category/subject quick and easily on your Blog.

The most popular open source blogging package is Wordpress.

http://wordpress.org/

This is a free blogging package (yep nothing to pay!), and is extremely flexible and easy to use without sacrificing anything in power and flexibility.

We use this package and recommend you do as well.

We have built some fully SEO optimized WordPress blogs that you  get  for free  as part of our FREE  12 days to Page One on Google e-course.

Because of  its  popularity,  many Web host’s have made installation of WordPress  very easy for you with “one-click” installs.

Hopefully your web host will have it available.  Many web hosts use a package called Fantastico.

This package is designed to automate installation of popular software onto your website, and many webhosts use this package.  Many web hosts  have it installed which makes installation of Wordpress as easy as one-two-three!

Once Wordpress is installed you have the option of changing themes, and personalising the blog.

It’s very important that you do the customizations as listed below.

In it’s default state WordPress is not very “search engine” friendly, so I suggest you investigate making Wordpress friendlier for the search engines.

It is getting better now and the latest version of Wordpress 2.7 is  more SEO friendly.

You can take Wordpress to the next step by using a website like

http://www.wordpressdirect.com (automates installations,  and auto generating content).

And ..

http://www.semiologic.com

Which is really Wordpress on steroids!

Both are not free, but are worth checking out.
We will discuss these in a later post.

Once you have made the base changes, you need to add categories for your posts to organize your posts (very important).

The other thing you will want to do is change the contents on the sidebar (right hand side of the blog).

Ask for the optin

One of the things we recommend you do is have an “opt-in”  (for eg on the right or left hand side of the screen) so people can subscribe to your mailing list there.

You will notice that we have implemented our  Blog example below in the subdirectory and not in the root.

http://yourwebsite.com/blog

At the top of our  blog  at http://www.takeoverpageone.com/blog, you will see a logo & header, to the top left an offer of a free course,  and below that  links to our major categories (enabling the visitor or the search engines) to see all posts on a related category and then archives of previous months posts.

There is another  optin on the front page.

We actually have some content “hidden” for subscribers.

You can see there is nothing particularly fancy here, and probably 90% of what you see came out of the box with Wordpress, but with the few customisations we have made, the Blog is very useable.

Great, at this point, you now need some content, after all no one is going to be interested in your Blog if it’s empty, right?

So what should you write about in your Blog?  Good question!

We will cover that in a future post in detail as this is very important.

Cheers for now.