What is a Blog? What is Blogging?

So you’ve spent some time on the internet and found yourself wondering what is a blog, anyways…and now you’ve arrived here! It’s OK. You’re not the only one who may not be familiar with how blogging can relate to getting results on the web. We hope that this short tutorial will make it clearer! Hopefully you are ready to ask “how do I get started” rather than what is a blog upon reading…everyone has something to share!

Blog Explained

You’ve heard these can really get results, but are wondering exactly what this is. The word blog is short for weblog and is quite simply just that. It is a log of items that you publish relative to your website content, life or what you have to say (if it is an addition to your existing website). Some people choose to run these instead of a website. There is really no difference between a blog and a regular website aside from the way it is formatted. If you were to build a regular website in html, it would have the same benefits that a blog does in terms of search engines. It is the layout and design of the blogging infrastructure that brings benefits. They also have built in automated features allowing for easier promotion and content sharing, which is essential to the success of any online concern, whether it be a business or personal site.

Blogging Format

Traditionally, the weblog will be layed out with a main index page that features a list of posts that you publish in descending order with the most recent first. When you write a post, you will file it into a category and it is accessible this way by the topics you decide. The index page will usually feature navigation to these topics so the viewer can see only these items of interest. The main index page of the site however, pulls all of the posts, regardless of category into one page.

Why Do Search Engines Like Weblogs?

The net these days is about having access to fresh, updated and valuable content. Google and many other popular search engines have altered their algorhthms to find this content and deliver it to users. The blogging structure (shell of the site or CSS) is designed to show the search engines that this is in fact what you have and is constantly changing each page based upon the new postings. This is very good for a product that by default feeds into a form of search engine optimization.

What are the Built Promotion Features, Social Networking?

Another Strong Question. We will talk about Wordpress here as this is the platform we promote and believe in. Other systems such as Movable Type, Blogger or LiveJournal also existing and have similar features. Here are the items that WP features that are desirable:

• Pings Out to Directories So They Can Feature Your Post With a Link Back to Your Site
• Allows Users to Add RSS Feeds to Their Readers to Subscribe and Keep Up to Date and Revisit Upon Interest in Your Posting
• Allows Visitors to Make Comments
• Allows for Expandability with Add on Scripts, Commonly Referred to as Plugins
• Users Can Subscribe by Category Topic (if Configured)
• Other Webmasters are Automatically Notified if You Write About Their Weblog, With a Link Back to Your Site
• Allows for Multiple Publishers to Share Content Easily

These are really just some of the benefits and the list goes on and on, including the ability to add photos and media such as videos embedded into the post. Many of the popular social networking websites online will also allow the functionality of being able to easily add postings to your profile…including sites such as Facebook.

So quite simply, you will find this to be a publishing tool that allows you to also easily self edit both the postings and the regular website if it is run that way. We very commonly setup a regular Wordpress website, which is a site that runs with the integrated feature that has static pages just like any site. We then add the weblog to it and integrate the postings. These sites can be very high impact if setup and configured properly. It is always suggested to have a professional webmaster do this due to the complexity. They can be setup by a novice, but quite often, this is not done correctly, which has a direct impact on the performance. The small amount of money spent for proper configuration typically outweighs in search engine optimization and performance what you would save doing it yourself.

(Technorati is heralded as being the largest player in taking RSS Feeds from sites and offering posts in a syndicated fashion as a third party in a directory structure). The Technorati CEO, Dave Sifry explains the basics in the video below. The emphasis here is really his touching on reaching like minds, which is exactly what this technology does!

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