The Blog Squad had a great post today on their blog, Build a Better Blog called Great Blogs: What goes into them?

Their post points out 5 things that make a blog great, and they are:

1. Gets you found by the people who need you.
2. Establishes you as an expert in your niche
3. Builds credibility and trust with readers so they see you really know what you’re talking about
4. Develops and strenghens relationships with readers through interaction and conversation
5. Showcases your personality so readers feel they know you, your values, your passions

Michael and I talk about all of these points in the Blawg for Profit program. And they really are key. If you just throw up a blog and don’t keep it updated, or maintain it and make sure it is designed to show up correctly in all browsers, you will not be pleased. And if you don’t strive to achieve the 5 goals as set out above, you will not see results.

Drop us an email and we would be glad to answer any questions you might have.

Matt Cutts is a software engineer at Google.  As many of you know, Google is rather secretive about “the algorithm” and how to best get ranked on the search results page.  Matt recently gave a speech on some search engine optimization strategies.  A link to the video of that speech is here.  A summary of some of his most interesting revelations is here.

I was glad to see him say that Wordpress is good for search results right out of the box.  That is the platform this site as well as my lawforprofit site is based upon.  It is also the platform we are using for the customized blogs we are doing for clients here at BlawgforProfit.

A hat tip to Daily Blog Tips for the find.

Jay Fleischman is one of those guys that just gets it. Jay publishes a great blog called Bankruptcy Practice Pro where he provides some wonderful information about managing and marketing a law practice. He is also one of the individuals behind the very successful Bankruptcy Law Network.

Recently, Jay had a post called “The Awful Truth About Paid Online Marketing“ where he has the nerve to tell us the nasty secret about pay-per-click advertising - it simply doesn’t work as well as you may think. To back up his position, he mentions a study called Banner Blindness.

What is banner blindness? According to our friends at Wikipedia, it is “a usability phenomenon in which a website visitor completely overlooks a banner. Such a banner may either be an advertising banner from an external site, or a banner that the serving site intends to use to promote content or a navigation link.”

Jay goes on to point out what I have been saying for some time, content is what will keep your readers Provide good content and you will get readers. You will get noticed and you will get what makes blogging great, incoming links. If there is one thing you must remember, content is king. You must provide good, up to date, relevant content.

I love it when I get my posting ideas from my readers. Had an email sometime back from Lisa Solomon at Question of Law and The Billable Hour. We were exchanging thoughts on Permalinks and linking between blogs. Lisa pointed out to me that some blogs don’t provide a Permalink. I was actually shocked. I never really noticed this and began to ponder the issue. As Lisa and I further discussed this, I remembered that some blogging platforms provide the permalink within the title of the post. Problogger and others do that. My blogs all have a permalink “link” at the end of every post. What I came up with is why. Why would you not provide a permalink in your blog. As I have mentioned a number of times in my tips, linking to other blogs is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your own blog. The more links you have to your blog, the more the search engines love you. Linking is one of the items that make blogs move up so fast in the search engines. It makes it very hard to link to a particular post on a blog if there is no permalink. In fact, Problogger has a great post on linking at the link I just provided. He states in part:

Blogs and links are the perfect couple. Of course, everyone knows that. You don’t have to be a hopeless romantic or some SEO techie type to figure that one out.

In addition:

Blog links have search engine power for several reasons. One of which is the different types of linking featured on blogs. All blog links are not the same, and that is part of their secret search engine rankings power. Different types of links provide different rankings boosts, in several different ways. In the end, the links add up to your blog being placed highly, for your most important keywords, in Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search.

Take my advice. Provide a permalink to your post. If you do, you will see your search engine ranking increase.

I have read a lot about what is being called “linkbaiting.” The Search Engine Journal defined Linkbaiting this way:

Linkbaiting is one of the most universally effective tactics for promoting a site, both for search engine rankings and short-term traffic boosts.

Blog SEO defined it this way:

Linkbaiting is a habit of writing good content with the sole purpose of getting linked to it.

Good content will get you incoming links. Writing good content will get you incoming links. I considered my own habit of linking to other blogger’s post. And it is the content of that post that catches my eye. Not who else has linked to it. Not the tags they use. It is the content. For example, take the two links above. I used those links for the content of those post. Nothing more, nothing less. The Search Engine Journal gave some guidelines on what content to write about to get those link backs.

Understanding what content, features, and subjects are “in” with the technorati (the web-literate individuals, not the blog aggregation site) is a subjective, but important piece of the linkbait creation puzzle.

There’s that word again, CONTENT. The Blog SEO provided 2 ways to be good linkbaiters. The first hint is:

Know what’s up You need to know what’s going on on the Web and know what’s hot. A good way of finding out is checking out the popular searches on Technorati.

Taking the first hint, let me expand. One of the blogs I do is the Kansas Family Law Blog. I am providing a professional service on that blog. It is not my goal on that blog to generate traffic for ads, as you won’t see Chitika ads on that blog. One of the ways I decide what content to provide is to know what is going on. But not by checking out the popular searches on Technorati. What I do check out, are the searches I find my readers are doing by checking the stats of my blog. While checking those stats I can determine what actual searches are being typed into Google or Yahoo. I take those search requests and make them into post. In checking my stats nightly over a short period of time, I can usually see a pattern of what questions are being asked. Taking those questions and doing a post gets me traffic to my blog. It is not linkbaiting, but it does get me traffic, which is our goal. I am also following the first hint mentioned above, I am keeping up on what is hot and writing content to match what is hot. The second hint is:

Promote your article If you feel that you’ve created something link-worthy, the next obvious step is promotion. Things become easy when you are a well established blogger with thousands of readers, but what if you’re not. SearchEngine Journal recommends that you contact a few well known bloggers in your niche and ask them to critique your article. Please don’t ask for a link because your request will most likely be ignored. When you get an e-mail back with some criticism, be ready to make changes and e-mail them back thanking them and announcing that you’ve made some adjustments. Most likely they will talk about it to their readers.

The second hint is a good one, but it all goes back to content. If you provide good content, you will get noticed. And those that notice you will link to your blog. Let me take my professional service blog again for an example. When you do a blog that is really a niche marketing blog, you end up developing a so called network of other professional service blogs. We take advantage of RSS and have our news-readers set to catch ever new post our professional service blogging friends do. If there is something there that catches our eye, we post about it and of course give them credit. For me, I know those that I follow provide good content. You can tell by their blog design and of course the posting they do. Take a look at some of them: Alabama Family Law Blog South Carolina Family Law Blog In my humble opinion (again), if you are doing a blog that is a niche blog, you will develop a following of others in that niche. And, by default, you will get incoming links from those fellow niche bloggers. Of course, remember them and do some outgoing linking to them. There has also been a lot of talk lately about asking for links. Let me just state, I get emails each week asking me to link with someone. I read everyone of those emails. And if the blog provides GOOD CONTENT, I link to them. Remember this, the results you get will be directly reflective of the work you want to put in. This will not be easy and it will take some work. If you are just starting a new blog, the work in the beginning is more than you will do down the road. You will need to post and post and post early in your blogs life. But you will get noticed and it will pay off. CONTENT is the key, not baiting others with slick tricks or spamming. Related Linking Articles: • Law Blogs work when you get links to your law blog.

If you don’t have Trackbacks and Comments enabled on your blog, do it. I allow Trackbacks and Comments on all my blogs. I do however moderate them to keep out spam.

Not only should you allow them on your own blog. You should do Trackbacks as often as possible and you should Comment on other other post as often as you can.

A Trackback is the method of informing a blogger that you are linking to and using information from his post. Both Trackbacks and Comments are just one tool to also help you with your SEO.

The following are additional reasons from Problogger why you should be doing Trackbacks and Comments.

• Leaving a comment or two makes your name familiar and lets the blogger know that you read his or blog. You become a person, a person who is interested and interesting. Leaving a trackback before you ever comment can look like you are standoffish or too busy to comment.
• Leaving a trackback on the same post where you’ve left a comment can work really well, if you are truly interested in the dialogue and the topic. Think of it as a real conversation, that you might have had with a fairly new friend. If you were truly engaged and thought of a new point on your way home, you might shoot him an email or IM to pass it along.
• The track post that you write shows that you took the conversation at the original blog one step further. Almost everyone would think that’s a compliment, sending a trackback is a lot like saying ‘You’ve got me thinking, and I’m telling others good things about you.’ Who wouldn’t like to hear that?

Good advice to follow. So, go forth and Comment and do Trackbacks and increase your own traffic.

I for one have always favored full-text RSS feeds. And quite frankly when others don’t use them, I rarely visit the rest of the post by clicking through from my newsreader. I am a newsreader blog surfer. And if you aren’t using full-text feeds, you are not getting the readership you deserve.

Kevin O’Keefe has finally seen the light and is a convert himself.

I’m a convert to full-text RSS feeds. Being the small minded lawyer I am, I began blogging with excerpt feeds wanting users to come to blog. My logic was that readers would read more about me and what I did - like they cared.

When I switched to full text RSS feeds more people read my blog posts and more people, other bloggers and the media, cited my blog posts in their writings. My reputation as an authority on lawyer blogs grew and LexBlog’s business increased.

LexBlog’s law firm clients, thinking traffic and stats is the goal, want people coming to their blog to read their posts. However, I’m going to advise full text feeds going forward. Stats is not the goal - enhancing one’s reputation as an authority in a niche practice area and a growth in business are the real goals.

In addition, the Feedburner weblog mentions full-text feeds too.

Dennis Kennedy touches on this subject also. Dennis states:

There’s long been a debate over whether to distribute your RSS feed as an excerpt feed or a full-text feed.

I started out with an excerpt feed because I enjoyed writing a customized “excerpt” as a teaser. I didn’t use the standard automatic “first 20 or 50 words” excerpt that people commonly use today. I switched to a full-text feed because I preferred full-text feeds from other blogs and sites. And because I sometimes spent more time on writing the excerpt than the full post.

There are good reasons that you might choose to distribute a full-text or an excerpt feed. Excerpt feeds require that a reader click-through and visit your blog. Full-text feeds let your readers read the full post without going to your blog.

Over the years, people who use newsreaders to consume RSS feeds often reach a point where they feel that they have subscribed to WAY TOO MANY feeds. They then decide to prune their list of feeds. Historically, one of the easiest ways to cut the feeds you subscribe to is to delete those that offer only excerpts of posts.

The reason should be apparent. You save yourself the time and effort of clicking through to see the rest of the post. If you read feeds offline with a stand-alone reader, as I often do, then you will prefer full-text feeds because you can read everything in the post.

So, if you are blogging and not doing full-text feeds, stop it. Do full-text feeds. I have been doing them since almost the beginning of my blogging. It has not harmed my traffic one little bit.

New York attorney Nicole Black, a lawyer blogger, shares 10 tips for generating traffic to legal blogs.

1. Decide why you’re starting a legal blog–Is it to generate new business, establish your expertise in a particular area of practice, provide you with a web presence and/or more visibility, or is it simply an outlet that allows you to express yourself?
2. Determine who your target readers are–Are they potential clients, lawyers who practice in the same area of law as you do, lawyers located in the same geographic area as you or some other type of professional? This will help craft your content.
3. Create a blogroll–Your blogroll should serve two purposes: it should assist your readers in locating interesting content and it should alert other bloggers to your newfound blog’s existence.Send an email to the bloggers on your blogroll and let them know that because you enjoy their blog, you’ve added it to your blogroll–and a reciprocal link would be greatly appreciated, but is certainly not necessary.
4. Consider adding a link to Evan Schaeffer’s Legal Underground–This blog is a high traffic blog and he regularly acknowledges those blogs that have linked to his own.
5. Make sure that Tom Mighell is aware of your blog–Drop him an email so that he knows that your blog exists. His well known blog, Inter Alia, regularly features new legal blogs, and by letting him know about yours, he may mention your new blog more quickly.
6. Add your blog the legal blog directories listed on Nicole’s blog.
7. Submit blog posts to Blawg Review–Each week Blawg Review features blawg content from the past week. Consider signing up to host Blawg Review.
8. Read Kevin O’Keefe’s blog–His business is law blogs, and his blog always provides helpful tips for both new and experienced bloggers.
9. Regularly link to other blogs in your posts–Other bloggers will notice and appreciate it, and may reciprocate in kind.
10. Submit relevant comments to law blogs somewhat similar to your own–Make sure that your name is linked to your blog, so that anyone who clicks on it will be directed to your blog.

One tip that I would provide a bit of caution on however is the blogroll. While I agree, you should have a blogroll on your blog. Be careful to provide relevant links. Especially if your legal blog is a niche blog. Remember your target audience.

An AP report today states that Nielsen/NetRatings, one of the leading Internet stats services, will ’scrap rankings’ based on page views and replace it with how long visitors spend at websites. The reason is that online video and technologies such as Ajax ‘increasingly make page views less meaningful.’ We’ve known for some time, but it’s big news if a major stats service like Nielsen/NetRatings officially degrades the importance of page views. Note that later in the AP article, it states that Nielsen won’t be fully scrapping page views - they ‘will still provide page view figures but won’t formally rank them’. How does this affect blogs?Blogs are a good case where ‘time spent’ is more meaningful than page views. Especially since the blogosphere is particularly prone to the ‘quantity over quality’ problem. It’s easy to pump out 20+ posts a day - and that tactic garners a lot of page views. But are those blogs actually writing for their readers, or writing to get page views? In other words, check the ‘time spent on site’ figures for those blogs and I think you’d find it is very low - because users click through, find nothing of value, and quickly leave. Is that good for advertisers on those sites? No it isn’t. So in the case of blogs, I’d argue that ‘time spent on site’ is a better measure than the easily gamed (or at least cynically exploited) page view model.

What Nielsen’s Competitors Are DoingThe AP report states that Nielsen’s rival, comScore Media Metrix, ‘addressed the rise of Ajax with the development of site ‘visits’ — defined as the number of times a person returns to a site with a break of at least a half-hour.’ But that doesn’t take into account the effectiveness of a site, because again people could be visiting a site due to it being highly ranked in Google - yet when they click through they find rubbish content and so very quickly leave.

Source for Post: Clippings.