Wordpress vs. Blogger

I recently asked the community of bloggers over at the Digital Point forums for their opinions on two of the leading free blogging platforms available, WordPress and Blogger. I currently use Blogger for this blog, but have heard so many good things about WordPress that I decided to find out more. And to my surprise, as a long-time Blogger user, WordPress came out way ahead in my informal poll. Here are some of the reasons provided by WordPress fans:

• WordPress offers more control over blog layout and publication settings, and there is a larger selection of user-developed features such as blog themes and plugins for WordPress than there is for Blogger.

• If you host a WordPress blog on your own domain and server, it's easy to implement Google AdSense to generate revenue from your blog. You can do this either by adding AdSense code directly to the blog template (same as you do in Blogger) or by using a special AdSense plugin.

• There is a large community of WordPress users developing custom blog themes, plugins, and other features, as well as providing support to newbie bloggers.

• SEO advantages: it's far easier to optimize a WordPress blog for search engines than it is for a Blogger site. Search optimization involves fine-tuning your blog's URLs, page titles, descriptions, headers, tags, and other key metadata to ensure it achieves a high ranking for relevant terms in search engine results. One responder noted that they'd created their blog using WordPress and never did any search optimizing on their own - but thanks to WordPress's built-in optimization features, the blog was getting over 500 hits from search engines per day within 6 months. Pretty impressive.
  
  
• One SEO feature that especially interested me is the ability to customize your permalink URLs. With Blogger, you're pretty much stuck with long, convoluted, date-stamped URLs for each post. But WordPress lets you configure these permalink URLs however you want, cutting out a lot of the extra baggage that can hurt your post's search rankings and frankly just looks weird.

• I also got the general sense that WordPress is regarded as a more professional blogging platform, and that because of its many different themes and display options, it's much easier to give your blog those little professional-looking touches than it is with Blogger.

Based on all the feedback I've received on the advantages of WordPress, I'll definitely have to give some serious thought to switching blog platforms - though I've got so much published on Blogger already it would be quite a project, but maybe worthwhile in the long run.

Got your own opinions on WordPress and Blogger? Feel free to post 'em in the comments below!

Encourage the Right Kind of Comments

While you're filtering comment spam with word verification and moderation tools, you should also be encouraging readers to post relevant, constructive comments on your blog. The right kind of blog comments are valuable in a number of ways:

• Each new comment increases the chance of another comment, as other visitors read and react to it. Ideally you'll end up with a full-blown discussion on your hands, with your comments section ending up longer than the original post!


• Readers find comments interesting and will keep coming back to your blog to read them. Thus, they make your blog more "sticky", in the parlance of web design.


• You readers may know more about a particular topic than you do, so you're likely to learn a thing or two from their comments. You may even get an idea for a future blog post from comments left in a previous one.


• The more good, on-topic content you blog has, the more search engines will like it. This makes relevant comments a highly cost-effective (aka, free) search optimization tool. All those new keywords and phrases help improve your search rankings and get your blog listed for more search queries.

A simple way to encourage relevant comments is to include a brief invitation at the end of each blog post. Something like, "Got experiences about topic ____ you'd like to share? Feel free to post them in the comments below!"

You can also write blog posts specifically designed to attract comments - use a provocative question as the title, or make an opinionated statement that readers just can't stop themselves from commenting on.

So...got any ideas about blog comments you'd like to share? Feel free to post them in the comments below! :-)

Pinging and Why Everyone's Doing It

If you've blogged for any length of time, like an hour, you've probably come across the term "ping" somewhere out there in the blogosphere by now, or else right in your own blog dashboard. For instance, Blogger gives you the option in the Settings > Publishing tab to send pings to Weblogs.com, which tracks updates to blogs on a near real-time basis.

But I'm already getting ahead of myself - what are these "pings" exactly? A ping is a digital signal (in XML-RPC format, if you care) that your blogging platform or another pinging piece of software can send out on your behalf each time your blog has been updated with new content. Pings are typically used by blog and RSS search and tracking services like search engines, news and RSS aggregators, and RSS feed generators and managers like FeedBurner. So they're a pretty hot commodity for services that want to make sure they're including the latest blog content as soon as it's been published. For example, following a ping, a blog search engine will know to send its crawlers through your blog to index your most recent post for its search results.

Pings also allow these blogophilic services (yes, I just made that term up) to allocate its resources wisely: if there's no ping, they'll assume there's no new content, and will send their crawlers to go index some fresh content instead rather than recrawl what's already in their database.

For you, the blogger, this makes pings a very good thing. Lots of sites out there are just waiting to receive them, eager to include your blog's content prominently in their search listings or RSS feeds. And pings are free to send and can either be sent automatically, or in mere seconds via a manual pinging service.

What's a manual pinging service? Well, one limitation of some automated pingers, like the built-in one in Blogger, is that it doesn't ping all the sites out there that are waiting to hear from you. So there's a need for services that can send multiple pings en masse to many ping-hungry sites at once. All you do is enter your blog's name and URL, select the sites you'd like to ping, and the pingers will do the rest. Here are three well-known ones for you to try:

Ping-O-Matic
PingOat
Blog Flux Ping Service

Let the pinging begin!

Key terms: ping, pinging, blogflux, blog flux, pingomatic, ping-o-matic, pingoat, pingout, ping oat, ping out, send pings

Tag, Label or Categorize Your Blog Posts

That's a lot of verbs for one headline. Why not just say "tag your blog posts" and call it a day? Well, different blogging platforms have different names for what I consider the same basic process. Maybe it's a legal thing. If you're writing a Blogger post (which I am) you have the option of attaching labels to it, which will classify it with other posts into a handy subject-specific archive. Way more useful and interesting than the standard date-based archives, imho.

If you're using WordPress, the same classification dealies are called "tags." In TypePad, they're known as "categories." In LiveJournal, which is owned by the same people as TypePad, they're also called "tags." To be frank I don't know what the subtle differences are, but I'm pretty sure they're a matter of degree, not of kind. If I had to come up with a single generic name for the things I'd probably go with "standard categorization nomenclature," or "SCM". Yeah, SCM. You know, on second thought, scratch that - "tags" is probably the best all-around name. Though it does make you feel like you're running some sort of yard sale.

Why use these tabs/labels/categories, anyway? (Ya know, I think I'll just call them tags from here on out. Sorry Blogger.) For one thing, they make your blog easier and more interesting to navigate. People can click on a topic of interest in your tags and immediately jump to all your posts on that subject. To make sure your tags get used to the fullest extent possible, it's a good idea to include a list of them in a prominent place on your blog. For example, you could list out all your current tags in the sidebar, so your readers see them as they're scrolling through your posts. If your tags are well-chosen, you're likely to get a lot more page-views from each visitor as they click through them. One challenge of blogging is that valuable older posts can get buried and forgotten in the archives. By tagging them, you can help them continue to get the attention they deserve from interested readers.

Another advantage of tags is they expand your blog's virtual "footprint" in search engines like Google. All those new, subject-specific tag pages should start appearing in search results, attracting visitors searching for the topic you've tagged - people who might not find your blog otherwise. In addition, because tags are by definition highly relevant keywords, having them embedded in each blog post adds to that post's search relevance. To put it another way, if a search engine had to decide whether to display two nearly identical posts, one with tags and one without them, it's likely to rank the tagged one higher because of all those meaningful keywords.

In general, the best features you can add to your blog have multiple positive effects, and that's definitely true of tags (or labels, or categories, or SCMs, or whatever...) They improve the user experience, increase your page views per visitor, help keep old content from languishing unloved in the archives, and can help your search rankings. Why do you think I use so many of them?

Key terms: tags, tagging, taging, labels, labelling, labeling, categories, catagories, subjects, topics

Use Blog Directories to Reach New Readers

A great way to increase your blog's visibility is by submitting to web directories that specialize in blogs. Submission to most of these directories is free, though some will request a link back from your blog in exchange for a directory listing, and a few charge a fee to review your submission and add it to the directory. I generally stick with the free ones, but if you've got money to burn, the paid directories will be happy to help!

There are many advantages to being listed in a blog directory. First and most obviously, someone browsing or searching the directory can find your blog and you'll have a new reader. Secondly, search engines like Google will notice your link in the directory, and will count it as a "vote" in favor of your blog. The more links they count in directories and other blog sites, the higher your search engine rankings are likely to be. The result - even more visitors to your blog.

Submitting your blog to a directory should be a very straightforward process: first, find the directory category that's most appropriate to your blog's subject. Then, use the directory's submission form to fill in the key details about your blog: the title, URL, a brief description of what it's about, and in some cases your contact information. Most reputable directories will review your submission within a few days, and you'll usually receive an email notification letting you know if your blog has been accepted.

Here's a list of blog directories that I've submitted to with success in the past. If you have others to suggest for this list, please feel free to post them in the comments.

Blog Catalog
http://www.blogcatalog.com

Blogrankings.com
http://www.blogrankings.com

Bloghub
http://www.bloghub.com

Blogwise
http://www.blogwise.com/

Globe of Blogs
http://www.globeofblogs.com

Eatonweb Blog Portal
http://portal.eatonweb.com/

Blogflux
http://www.blogflux.com/

BlogHop
http://www.bloghop.com/

Bloglines
http://www.bloglines.com/

Blogburst.com
http://www.blogburst.com/

LS Blogs
http://www.lsblogs.com

Blogmarks.net - a social bookmarking service
http://www.blogmarks.net/

Bloggernity.com
http://www.bloggernity.com/

Bloggeries.com (paid submission last I checked)
http://www.bloggeries.com/

BlogBib (also paid submission)
http://www.blogbib.com/

Submitting your blog to these directories can be a fast, easy way to expand your audience and get your blog noticed. Fame and fortune can't be far behind...right?

Key terms: blog directory, blogger directories, directorys, dircetory, diretory, submission, rankings, listings, categories

Increase Your Blog's Audience With Post Pages

If you're looking for easy ways to boost your blog's readership, one of the easiest may be just a couple clicks away. I'm talking about the ability to create "post pages," which simply means that each blog post you create will exist as its own stand-alone web page. But you'll need to make sure you're taking advantage of this feature in whatever blog software you use.

In Blogger, for example, blogs don't automatically come with post pages enabled. In a blog without post pages, the posts are strung together on the main blog page and in the archive pages, but can't be accessed individually through their own URLs. To give each post its own URL and web page, you'll need to click the Settings tab and then go to the Archiving settings. Here you should see an option called "Enable Post Pages." Select "Yes" from the pulldown menu and republish your blog, and each post will then have its very own web page. Using this post as an example, scroll down to the bottom and click the link where it says "10:57 AM". See how it brings up a separate page? Every post on this blog has the same time-stamped link at the bottom, which leads to its own web page.

What are the advantages of post pages? Well, one of the biggest ones is that they increase your blog's search engine exposure. When a search engine like Google crawls through your blog, it will find each of those post pages and index them separately in its search results. So when someone searches for the subject of that particular post, there's a good chance they'll find it in their search results. On the other hand, if the post doesn't have its own URL and web page, there's not a subject-specific page for the search engine to direct them to, so the blog is less likely to appear in those search results.

Another advantage of post pages is that it's easy to copy and paste their URLs into an email. If you want to show a friend only a specific post from your blog, having a handy URL to drop into an email makes it very easy.

Are there any disadvantages to post pages? Ummm....none that I can think of. So make sure they're switched on and get ready to attract some new readers!