Blogging: The Dos and Don'ts

Blogging is an art as much as it is a craft. If you want to drive traffic to your site, your information should be high quality, well optimized, and easily readable. As a result, there is a specific etiquette with regards to creating and publishing posts. The more you know about what to do and not do, the more successful you will be.

The Dos

There are many practices that you should be following, including:

* Add a contact link - This allows for visitors to easily contact you regarding content, industry news or just to talk about life. A contact link makes your blog more human, which will draw additional visitors.

* Proofread your site from a reader's point-of-view - Take this a step further and subscribe to your own blog so you can see exactly what they are seeing and make changes accordingly.

* Be cautious when posting your link and commenting on other blogs - This could open the door for continuous and annoying spam or something even more malicious.

* Make the site navigable and easy for the user to find specific information - Visitors traveled to your site for a reason; let them find the information they need as quickly as possible.

* Indicate the blog's purpose - There is nothing worse than losing traffic because the visitor could not determine what the blog was about.

* Utilize social media to drive traffic to your blog - This will open a new marketing channel to an audience that may not have otherwise found your blog.

* Check stats regularly but not incessantly - Checking and analyzing your statistics is important to determine trends and target visitor locations. This is especially important if your site is monetized.

The Don'ts

Similarly, there are many practices that you should not be following, such as:

* Adding excessive widgets - Do not clutter side bars with excessive widgets. This will cause confusion and make your site difficult to navigate which will drive traffic away.

* Have too many categories - This will also add clutter to your pages and decrease navigability.

* Add auto-play music or videos - This can be a major annoyance to visitors and distract them for the purpose of browsing your site.

* Write long paragraphs - Break your paragraphs up so they are easy to read.

* Make a header image - Large head images will require users to scroll down to view your content.