How to Build a Successful Blog | What Creative Design Agency

Getting your own blog is as easy as pie these days. There are so many platforms to choose from: Blogger, Posterous, WordPress, Tumblr to name but a few. But once you’ve set it up, what can you do to improve website traffic and earn your rights as a respected blogger? My introductory guide will show you a few tips and tricks to get you started…

Search Engine Optimisation

I’m starting with probably the biggest and most important topic in traffic building: SEO.

It’s about what you say and where you say it…

Most blogs will only use organic search engine optimisation (i.e. you haven’t paid for your blog to show in search results) so you need to think about your wording carefully, particularly your headings. For example, If I want to learn about HTML5 but I’ve never done it before I might search for “HTML5 for beginners”. Here’s the result.

Yep, we’re at the top. In Hobo-web’s testing, the #1 search result in Google gets 79% of the hits, versus 51% and 35% for #2 and #3 respectively. To boost your ranking more, you might want to try placing other keywords related to your content within the main text, but don’t force it (use plain English!) or overuse words because that could end up lowering your ranking - Google is pretty clever.

Summary

Bad example title: Soup
Good example title: Chinese chicken noodle soup recipe

Name your images properly…

How many times have you used Google image search to find a photo? Giving photos a good file name, alt tag and possibly a title tag too will help people find you. If you run a blog where you have a lot of images then doing this is pretty important. When I’m searching for recipes I tend to discover a lot of new blogs simply from finding their images first.

Some hosted blog services like Posterous change the name of your files on upload, so please be aware!

Summary

Bad image naming example: <img src=”picture1.jpg”/>
Good image naming example: <img src=”Chinese-chicken-noodle-soup-recipe.jpg” alt=”A big steaming bowl of Chinese chicken noodle soup” />

Try an SEO plugin…

If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog like me, then you will find an SEO plugin a wonder tool. It allows you to steer away from the default WordPress conventions and give myself post and page titles that are much more SEO friendly. My personal recommendation is Platinum SEO which is simple to set up and use. In addition to page and post title editing, it lets me add meta descriptions and keywords to individual posts to make them become more unique from other pages on the site.

Learn more about SEO…

If you want more advice on why you should use meta tags then you do worse than read Google’s Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide.

Sharing and building

One of the most obvious ways to take advantage of social media is to share your links on Twitter and Facebook. With Facebook you can have blog posts feed in to your wall or fan page and add the “like” button to your posts. Programs like Tweetdeck allow you to schedule tweets, so you could try a few different straplines to encourage people to click through and try to catch followers at different times /timezones throughout the day.

Commenting on other blogs…

Your position in search results is partially affected by links to your site from others’. It used to be that you would comment on other blogs in the hope that it would improve your ranking. However, spammers quickly latched onto this and posted spammy links, affecting your good ranking. Nowadays most blogs will use rel=”nofollow” on comments to prevent pageranking being affected, so commenting on other blogs is effectively useless this way.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel. Leaving good quality comments helps to establish you as knowledgeable in that field. People are naturally curious and will click on comment links to find out more about you. I’ve found many great blogs just by “surfing” the comments. Spread your comments around, that way you’re likely to reach a much wider audience.

Guest blogging…

Writing for other people is great way to boost your own popularity and show off your expertise. Most of the time you’ll have a biography about you included in the post, where you can promote your skills and provide links to your own blog. If you want to know more about guest blogging and find someone to guest blog for, then head over to My Blog Guest.

Positioning your blog in the market

It only takes a few seconds to make an impression, so make sure it’s the right one. When creating my blog I wanted to make it look classy, so I took the time to choose a nice script font and muted colours that would reflect this. I also try to take good quality photos to fit in with the theme; after all, a picture’s worth a thousand words. If you’re creating a blog about web design then you should be showing off your skills in the design of it. Take the time to understand who you want to be reading your blog and think about their reaction when they see your site.

Looks at your statistics

Finally, I never thought I would be that interested in my statistics, apart from seeing if anyone was looking at my blog at all. Now I’m there, checking it every night seeing where people have come from, what keywords they’re using to search and which pages they’re landing on. Checking all these factors allows you to adjust your content accordingly – if it’s a high ranking page, you may want to update the content from time to time to maintain that ranking. It’s also a great way of finding out who’s been linking to you since people don’t always tell you when they do.

If you have any more useful tips for creating a successful blog it would be great to hear them…

By Becs Rivett

http://www.welcomebrand.co.uk James

I’m going to leave a comment as suggested, I do find I get a bit of traffic to my site via comments I leave so this definitely holds true.

However, as I’m sure you’ll agree but didn’t write, the only way to have a popular (high traffic) blog is to either spam your way to glory or actually produce content worth reading and that adds value to your visitors day by solving a problem, showing them something new or interesting.

There are so many blogs out there these days that getting above the noise is very difficult indeed.
http://www.whatcreative.co.uk What!?

Hi James,

Thanks for the comment… and I do agree with you in that it is very difficult to be heard, and that’s why you have to write interesting articles that have value. I think that value can either come from writing completely unique, up-to-date content, or from writing something better than someone else… I think that people are far too wise about spamming now though and therefore I don’t think that this is a defining factor in whether a blog is successful or not. If you look at the most popular blogs out there, their popularity comes from, as you rightly said, their quality content.
http://www.floydpaul.com Floyd Paul

Another dead obvious and basic mistake of a lot of bloggers (Including myself) is to not post updated stuff often enough!!! Im going to try and post at least once a day. Hope fully that will drive more interest to my main portfolio site!
http://www.laythetable.com Becs Rivett

Hi Floyd, you’re absolutely right, that certainly is a factor because more pages = more words for google to surf on your site. I tend to only update my blog about once a week because otherwise my posts would be consderably lower quality (and quite frankly, it often takes me well over an hour to write out a recipe). There are many websites who still get plenty of hits without updating too often: Dustin Curtis and I am Paddy are two great examples. Their aim is to show off their web design skills and so each page is a custom designed blog post. A new post appears every one to two months. But as I say in the post, horses for courses!
http://www.torontolook.net Cierra Neifer

What a great blog! I agree with you