Blog, Blogger & Blogging!

Blog, Blog, Blog! Everyone of us has heard of the word "Blog" before, but only a few of us know about what a Blog is. Here we will go through comprehensive details about a blog, characteristics of a good blog and Do’s & Don’ts for writing a blog.

Introduction

Blog writing is an art and every blog writer had taken a start someday. No one can be a best blogger overnight as it takes knowledge, practice and experience.

A blog is an online personal space which is used to provide the readers, some reading material. Blog is alternatively used for the word "Web Log". It can be used to express personal feelings, views, ideas, thoughts, or to support a cause, or to promote a business with thousands of readers over internet. Even that one can earn one's living by writing blogs. A blog may be informational, political, educational, or personal.

Blog is basically a written self conversation about something. The person writing a blog is called a blogger and the act of writing a blog is called blogging. Initially, the blogs were written over the internet just like someone writes his diary. Later it started gaining the followers who were inspired of reading them because the blogs are written casually whilst the books and articles are written in a formal manner.

How to write a Blog?

An interesting title, an engaging writing style and an appropriate tone of words can attract the readers. The title shall be upto 65 characters or less. A blog shall be written in a conversational style, and excessive use of thesaurus and difficult vocabolary shall be avoided to keep the readers intact and to keep the blog understable & reader-friendly. A blog shall be written while keeping in mind that if you were reading this blog, how you were gonna react. Using the relevant and attractive images in a blog keep the readers to stay interested rather leaving it in half the way. Try to produce glossary of references at the end of blog if you are trying to address a huge audience. This is to enable the readers to follow what you are trying to convey while using a specific word or phrase.

The blog needs to be updated regularly to keep the readers visiting it or else the readers will ultimately lose interest in the blog. If there is a co-blogger with you then it becomes very easy to keep the blog updated on regular basis. A co-blogger shall possess the similar mindset like you otherwise it will present two different mindsets which will confuse the reader and ultimately they will lose interest in it. Try to mention that how often you update your blog so that the readers catch you up on the right time.

Readers shall be allowed to present their views about the blog through comments. It develops a dialogue between you and the readers, and hence they get involved with your blogs and provide important feedback for identifying and improving weaknesses of the blog. Keep a regular eye on the comments section as it is always open for the comments and anyone can post anything in the comments to distract the audience.

Try to share the link of your blog over your social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Whatsapp etc. This will route your social contacts towards your blog and hence will increase site traffic and page visits.

Aversions For A Blog

There are certain things one must avoid in writing a blog. For example, one must not mention one's personal problems in a blog unless it is necessary to be mentioned therein. Proofread your blog before publishing it because grammatical mistakes or typos (though not important) may result in diversion of the reader from the theme towards the mistakes. Unnecessary details and lengthy paragraphs may also result in leaving the blog in half way by the reader.

Search Engine Optimization

When you’re finished with writing a blog and you want to go for on-page SEO, go through the following points.

1.      Search Tags

First write down 10 to 15 tags which can fit inside your blog. Incorporate these tags inside the body of your blog in a natural style. Tags are the keywords or phrases used by the public to find something over the search engines. There’s not a specific number of keywords to be used for SEO, still you shall not use excessive keywords and keep the keyword density low.

2.     Meta Description

Meta description is usually few lines (150-160 characters) from the first paragraph of a post providing the reader an insight about what this link is all about. This is not counted for Google’s Keyword Algorithm yet can enhance your click-through rate.

3.     Page Title/Header

Page header or title is an important factor in SEO. Most of the sites select the post title as page title so keep a title with naturally included keywords.

4.     Anchor Text

Carefully select your anchor text (External/Internal Links) as search engines rank your page while considering your anchor text. The pages that are already ranked well for the similar keywords are best to be linked via anchor text.