Blog Basics

Making your blog easy to find

Even if you write the best blog posts on the Internet, you'll never get many readers unless people can easily find your blog. The internet is a big place, and making your blog stand out from millions of others is a challenge. Still, there are a few things you can do to make it more likely that new readers will visit your blog.

Help search engines find your blog with SEO

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a set of techniques you can use to make your blog more visible to people who are using search engines. The more visible your blog is, the more likely it will show up in search results.

Most SEO strategies are based on the way you write your blog. For example, including keywords in your posts can influence the search results your blog shows up in. For more information about SEO, review the Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide from Google.

Link to your blog elsewhere

A simple way to let people know about your blog is to link to it. For instance, you could send the link to your blog to people you think would enjoy it.

To reach more people, you can use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. You can post a link to your blog in your profile on these sites.

You can also use the networks' sharing tools to post links to individual blog entries which you think your online friends will find particularly interesting.You can create social networking accounts specifically for your blog— your blog's own Facebook Fan Page or Twitter feed. For people who want to keep their personal life separate from their blog, this can be a better choice than using your own Facebook or Twitter account. You can learn more about the pros and cons of linking your blog to your social networks in our lesson on Deciding How Much Personal Information to Share.

Make your blog easy to navigate

When people visit your blog, they should be able to easily find the posts they're interested in. There are a few things you can do with your blog posts that will make them easier for visitors to find.

• Give posts descriptive titles, so that people can skim your blog and find what they're looking for.
• Organize your posts by subject with tools like categories, tags, and labels.

Your blog's design will also influence how easy your blog is to navigate. Design elements like layout, color scheme, and text size will all affect your readers' experience, so you should consider these things carefully. The links below include design tips you may find helpful:

• Developing a Colour Scheme, from the WordPress team
• 6 Blog Design Tips for Non-Designers, from Back to Her Roots
• 13 Expert-Level Blog Design Tips for Beginners, from IncomeDiary