The term “blog”, shortened from the term web log, is a discussion site published on the web and consists of daily or weekly individual posts typically displayed in reverse chronological order with the most recent post appearing at the top.
Blogs are pretty open ended and can be about anything from product information to personal daily entries about the bloggers’ day to day life similar to a diary. WordPress has stated that there are over 100,000 WordPresses created every day and according to Wikipedia, there are over 165 million public blogs in existence.
Considering that the competition is so fierce when it comes to blogging, you have to make sure that you do your research very well when deciding what type of blog you want to create. Before starting to research what type of blog you want to create, you will see the acronym ‘SEO’ appearing in conjunction with blogging.
In layman’s terms, SEO which stands for search engine optimization, is the practice of improving both the onsite and offsite elements of your website or blog in order to increase the visits you get from people using a search engine to find something, whether they are looking for a product to buy or a review on a movie.
Onsite SEO refers to the content and structure of your blog. This is everything from your URLs to the keywords mentioned in the page titles and so on. Offsite refers to how search engines rank your site according to how other sites link to it. Think of it as a reference system. The more people referencing your website, the higher its ranking will become.
You will also have to take into consideration what content will be on your blog, who your target market will be and who your competitors will be. You also have to make sure that if you choose a specific niche, there is enough for you to say about your topic. You don’t want to run out of ideas within a few months of blogging!
The two most common types of blogs out there are:
Personal Blogs
This is probably the most common type of blog out there. A personal blog is an ongoing diary or commentary by an individual. Personal bloggers take a lot of pride in their blogs and they often have an element of sentimentality and intimacy to them.
Microblogging
Similar to personal blogs, microblogging is just on a smaller scale. Twitter could be seen as a microblog. People can exchange digital information easily, whether it is a file or an image. The ‘update status’ feature in Facebook, can be seen as microblogging. Microblogs can also consist of micro corporate blogs promoting themselves.
You want to make sure that whatever type of blog you want to create is SEO friendly. There is no point in creating an amazing, interesting blog which has not been optimized and won’t be found by anyone.
