How is it that you can spend hours posting on your blog, optimizing the content, submitting it to countless differentdirectories and yet no one reads it.
The answer is usually content.
Blogging has over the last few years become the number one way of reaching across the world wide internet to keep in communication with your customers and or friends, find new contacts and generally spread the word.
It is however no use if it is merely adding to the pile of internet garbage.
The modern approach of the get rich Internet Marketing Community has encouraged the writing of blogs just to enhance this approach.
Fill your blog with unrelated and often duplicated articles.
Write more blogs and inter link them.
Find back links by the dozen and hey presto the search engines will love you.
Fat chance, you may get a few hours of glory but then your blog gets lost again in the flotsam.
The problem is not with the optimization, the design of your blog, the number and frequency of your posts, the number and quality of your back links.
The problem is with your content.
Back to Basics Blogs were designed to give and share valuable information.
They are there to help searchers to find answers to their problems, not primarily to make you a millionaire, although this is possible.
The idea is that some people will have knowledge or be an expert on a particular subject that others who are looking for, will find value.
The key words are Knowledge and Value.
What is valuable content.
As I said before, valuable content is something that answers a question.
It need not be an in depth article.
Most people looking for information on the internet want a quick solution to their question or problem.
When looking for an answer to a cooking problem they do not want to know where the ingredients are grown however interesting this may be to the writer.
They want your expertise to help them.
Valuable content is what you know about your subject.
If you think that you do not know enough about the subject you are writing about you are at perfect liberty to find some other material that does give that knowledge.
In fact it is better to use a reference to some other expert rather than try to fluff it out yourself.
This way your blog gets known for the value of the information that can be found on it.
What about search engine optimization.
You can spend hours optimizing your blog to the n'th degree but without the value in the content you are not going to keep your readers or attract others.
By all means do the basics of optimization as this will most certainly alert the spiders but do not spend time that you could be writing good content.
Search engines are far more attuned to the popularity of your blog, eg.
how many people read it, than they are to all the SEO tricks in the world.
Basic key word research and the use of appropriate key phrases will ensure that your blog is indexed correctly.
What about back links.
Back links are certainly important from the search engine point of view but you do not have to spend too much time adding comment to other peoples blogs.
A few well placed comments on authority sites are enough.
As you gain readers for your comments they will supply all the back links you need.
To gain readers again you need good valuable content.
The better your content the more your readers will supply the back links.
How often should you post? There is no particular formula to this.
Some people will post every day others once a week.
Again it depends on the value of the content and the type of blog you are writing.
If it is a gossip blog you may have to add content very frequently to keep your reader interest.
If however your blog is centered around a specific niche subject you can space the posting of your blog content.
It is a good idea to keep to a regime of posting as your readers will then know when to expect the.
The paramount thing though is to concentrate on the quality of your post, not the frequency.
Blogging gimmicks come and go with alarming frequency but good content lasts for years.