If you have a website then the smart thing to do is to have a blog associated with your website. If you have a smart blog SEO program the spinoff is that it can aid your websites SEO program.

Blogs have the characteristics that search engines love, fresh content, a site that appears to be growing at a steady rate, keywords that appear with a host of variations and, with appropriate blog SEO strategies, a lot of inbound links.

You add all those characteristics together with smart blog SEO strategies and you have a blog that ranks highly for a variety of keywords. Links from the blog to website can help to boost the websites rankings as well.

For website owners, the benefits are invaluable. A boost in the websites rankings can lead to an increase in organic traffic. A blog with the correct blog SEO program should also rank well and receive its fair share of organic traffic. If the blog is well setup then much of that traffic can be funneled through to the website with hopefully an increase in conversions.

The biggest plus to website owners is the blogs ability to connect with customers and potential customers along with other related websites and blogs. The dialog  that can be established  can lead  to a real boost in brand or product awareness along with the development of an company’s reputation. Clever use of blog SEO along with social marketing and bookmarking can further that exposure.

The more traffic a blog receives, the more traffic that can potentially flow through to a web site. The more exposure a blog can get, the more opportunities there are for inbound links to both the blog and the website. These are all healthy steps to gaining a high position in the SERP’s which is after all the ultimate aim of both website and blog SEO.

Sometimes you discover thing by trial and error, at other times you read someone else’s tip and think – so simple. While writing an article elsewhere I wanted a particular effect in blog design that would enable a bullet point yet follow on with the associated text. Here is what normally happens:

• Blog Design Tip Here: either the follow on text appears here:

or the follow on text appears here.If you press enter after the first line of text you get another bullet. Turn the bullet of and you get the blank line. The effect I wanted was as follows:

• Blog Design Tip Here:
  with the associated text here which can wrap around for as many lines of text as you need to complete the associated text.
• Next Blog Design Tip Here:
  1 – more associated text here
  2 – and here (these are manual numbers rather than auto)

To achieve this simple but effective blog design effect in WordPress, at the end of the bulleted line of text, use the MS Word trick of holding Shift whilst pressing Enter. It enters a soft return rather than a hard return.

This tip works well for numbered points as well:

1. WordPress Tip
   associated text
2. Another WordPress Tip Here
   a) with more text here
   b) and here

This is simply a case of taking a function from one software package and using it on another. A neat effect for you blog design and a way of providing bullets or numbers that stand out whilst including explanatory text.

Many probably didn’t notice, nor care, that WordPress turned 5 on the 27th of this month, but then, WordPress was pretty quiet about too. WordPress tips still abound however, and today’s tip comes courtesy of Lorelle on WordPress and deals with graphics stored away from the WP content directory.

Lorelle, who is arguably the Grand Dame of WordPress, suggests the following solution for locating graphics with your blog site.

By using a feature called base href in the head of your header.php template file, you can establish the artificial “root” from which to look for file references. eg,

base href=”http://example.com/”

This single command instructs a browser to treat the sites root directory as the default directory. Lorelle has other WordPress tips on offer including working with the template files.

Sometimes you can get caught with a brain drain that leaves you bereft of any thoughts for that day’s blog content. If you find yourself in that situation then Yahoo! Answers may have the ‘answers’ you need.

Select the advanced search function and enter your keyword in the search term box (1).  Check the questions only check box (2) then hit search. I used the term ‘sewing machines’ in this search. You will need to look at you blog content requirements and genre to determine what to search for.

You can refine your search to a particular category, language and status; resolved, undecided and open questions. Unresolved (open) questions may be a good place to start if the number of results returned are too great.

The results returned 2,692 questions (3) on sewing machines. If you cannot find a topic to write on in that list then try a new keyword. You can also try ‘how do I’ type questions as well particularly if your blog content has a history of producing that type of content. If not, perhaps it is time it did.

Having a mental block happens to the best of us and can strike at any time. Producing fresh blog content on a regular basis  can be difficult so any tools that trigger a train thought are definitely useful.

Yahoo! Answers may well have the questions that could resolve your blog content writers block.

There are many blog and website services that offer reviews of your site; some for free and some charge a good amount for their service. There are some top named bloggers that earn a reasonable living just from the review side of their business. However, are they of any value?

To answer this question you need assess why it is you would get a review in the first place. Is it to get more traffic; gain a back-link; or simply as a part of a marketing exercise? The second question then needs to look at who is going to do the review. Blog and website services offer reviews as either published critiques or as simple assessment type reviews. The later is frequently offered attached to a marketing campaign to recruit to new clients for SEO and web design companies.

Traffic: If you are looking to gain more traffic then your review must be published and be on a site that has a good traffic flow. No matter how good the review is, if there is no traffic then that is what you will get your share of: remember, 50% of nothing is still nothing.

Links: Having a review done to obtain links can be a good idea. You do however need to be aware of search engines like Google who don’t like reviews and links – classifying them as paid links. You may however find that the site doing the review has good traffic which flows on to you. If you can gain links from these visitors then a ‘nofollow’ link on the review may be of great benefit.

Promotion: If you are having a review done as part of your marketing strategy then don’t be afraid to have the link as ‘nofollow’; Even better if the ‘nofollow’ is in the robots file. If the review is syndicated at all then your will get link benefit from the syndication.

Assessment: A review that is undertaken for assessment may not be a published review. These are undertaken to assess your SEO, design and general user friendliness of your site. They can be quite valuable if done without future financial motive in mind.

Reviews can be valuable if undertaken for the right reason by the right people. A review for the sake of a review from a site that is really looking to use you as content may not be in your best interests in the long run. Blog and website services can offer good reviews of your sites if you are thinking of upgrading or getting into some serious search engine optimization programs.