One of the fundamental differences between a regular website full of articles and an informational blogsite full of posted entries is that the latter shows articles on the home page posted in reverse chronological order. In other words, the most recent posting is shown first. As you go down the page, the entries get older.

The problem with this is that when your blog is new, and your readers are few, the chances of having readers that come back every day is low. Building up "subscribers" takes time and relevant content. This is true for regular websites, too, but a professional website has had its navigation designed for optimum use by visitors.

A professional, informational blog should be no different. (Understand that I am focusing on informational/educational blogs that can both be read on a daily basis as well as used as a reference site long after certain entries are posted.)

In fact, to be successful against hordes of competition, a to-be-popular informational blog needs be both findable via the search engines, as well as navigable. At the very least, you need the following components in your blog:

1. Relevant content with appropriate titles and URLs containing keywords. This helps you get the search engine referrals.
2. A list links to your recent posts. This is a part of helping your visitor find an appropriate blog entry. This is in case they land on your blog home page a few days after the article they thought they were linking to was indexed.
3. A list of categories for your posts. Using a service like Techorati is highly recommended. (Follow the links at the end of the this post to get an idea of what I'm talking about. I get a fair number of referrals from Technorati, when people search on a tag I've used. What's great about services like Technorati is that if I post frequently using my selection of tags, I tend to stay pretty high up on the search results because of the SEO work I've done.) But Technorati-tagging isn't always enough, once I get a visitor. If the visitor arrives at your blog home page and doesn't find what they were looking for, seeing a list of categories at least tells him/her that they have (or haven't) come to a suitable blog.
4. Regular references to older posts, as relevant. Create regular readers by pointing them to information you have previously posted that they either might be interested in, or need to understand before reading a new post. Because I write a lot of informational blogs, and because I am a very verbose writer, I have recently started breaking up my content into a mini-series (or threads) of posts. But certainly readers will be frustrated if they arrive at part 7 and can't find any of the earlier parts. While I have currently only referred back one entry in a series, I am working on a reference page that lists the series I have so that new readers can follow them from the beginning. (This is difficult to do if you are using free blog hosting; which is I've left it until I could set up countwordula.com.)

This is just a summary of some tips that make it easier for your visitors to really find what they are looking for. I'll eventually set up a tipsheet on BlogSpinner and update as I collect new tips and techniques.

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

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