Blogs can, over a period of time, run to hundreds or even thousands of pages. These bloging tips will help to maintain your blogs security.

Use the latest version. An obvious tip, however there are many blogs still using outdated software - software that has more holes than a sieve when it comes to security.

Update your plugins. another obvious tip, however I apply one caveat to this tip - wait. When a new update is available  - check to see if it has caused any problems - if everyone seems to be happy, then update.

Change your admin password on a regular basis. Need  I say any more. Passwords can be hacked so change them regularly.

Use security scanning software. There are several plugins (for WordPress) that can help with security issues.  These can take some of the worry out of your daily grind.

Backup - frequently and often. Backup your blog and store the backup off site. If your host has problems, you have a complete backup to reinstall elsewhere if necessary.

Those five tips are obvious and straightforward tips. However you would be surprised at how many bloggers don’t use these practices at all and then wonder what to do when their site get compromised done the track.  Safe guard your blog - work on it.

Traffic from search engines is important and the only way you can get this traffic is by ensuring your blog SEO strategies are effective. For the novice, these blog SEO basics will help to gain that traffic.

• URL Structure
  Getting your keyword into the URL is important. Re-structuring your URL to keep it simple and clean makes it easier for the search engine spiders to index. Where possible, modify the URL to show the title first with the blog name to follow. For WordPress users there are several plugins that can help to modify URL’s
• Page Titles
  Like URL’s, getting keywords into the page title is important. You have two audiences with page titles, the search engine spider and the reader. You need to make your title catchy enough to attract the reader whilst keyword effective for the search engine.
• Duplicate Content
  Avoid duplicate content at all costs. If your posts are entered into more than one category you may find that the spiders index the content twice - or more. Use the robots.txt file to no index possible duplicate areas.
• Meta Tags
  Be sure your Meta Tags are unique for each page where possible. The page title should appear in the Description tag.
• Image Tags
  Ensure that all images have appropriate alt tags. Also see whether or not the images are placed effectively with related text close by.

Whilst these are only basic blog SEO tips, if you optimize with each of them in mind, you will give your blog a great boost in the search rankings. Depending on the blog software you use, there may be plugins or utilities available to help with these tasks.

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.

There are so many blog metrics packages available at present and each of them tend to produce different results. I am curious to know which packages are popular.

Sitemeter seems to be popular with most blogs although it went through a tough period last year with claims of a third party tracking cookie. Sitemeter allows either hidden data collection or the use of a site meter to display your traffic. Sitemeter is reasonably good particularly if you want a quick look at your traffic numbers on a regular basis. As a blog metrics package, it provides little in the way of deep data.

Google Analytics is a popular package although if you were to run it and say Sitemeter side by side you would find some big discrepancies. There seems to be a lot of traffic that Google Analytics doesn’t pick up. As a blog metrics package, it provides data on just about every conceivable angle of your traffic. It is a pity that it misses so much traffic.

AW Stats and Stat Counter provide reasonable arrays of data; however they too seem to suffer from data loss. It seems when it comes to collecting data, there is no one package that can pick up every visitor and provide you with the information you require. Blog metrics is a difficult task to manage. Often the simplest metric, the number of comments and links in are better guides to your success.

Many bloggers use Adsense to try and generate some blogging income. Many bloggers also use Google Adwords to advertise their site. Do you ever stop and actually look at the ads on your site, or anyone else’s for that matter?

The good folk over at Royal Pingdom apparently do and they have come across some rather interesting, and amusing, ad units. It seems some marketing people do have a sense of humor, albeit a little warped. There are even pairs of competing ads that appear to be carrying on a conversation, or making statements and counter statements. It certainly makes your blogging income a little amusing when you come across these types of ads.

The ads that really stood out were the ascii art ads. Very clever and apparently had the effect of increasing click throughs - a definite bonus to those publishers needing a boost in their blogging income.

If you need a little lift for the weekend, or perhaps some inspiration for your next Adwords program, I suggest you check these tongue in cheek ads. If your using Adsense to generate blogging income then keep your eyes open for the occasional crazy ad.

There seems to be a growing trend towards having more than one writer on a blog these days so a blog metrics plugins sounds ideal. It seems that groups are being established with the sole aim of writing across a dozen or more blogs, rotating between blogs on a daily basis. It would be nice if you could track each writer’s impact on each of the blogs.

With the Blog Metrics plugin you can do just that. To quote from Joost de Valk’s site:

“…it calculates how many track-backs you received on average per post, and does a better job of calculating comments. But that’s only a small part of what’s cool in it, the coolest part, is that it now generates stats per author as well!”

This blog metrics plugin is handy for determining how often each writer publishes a post, the average length of each post, the number of comments received on posts and the number of words per comment.

You may wonder about the number of words per comment, however this help to distinguish between posts that receive discussion type comments and those that receive ‘nice post’ type comments. Blog Metrics plugin is useless for blogs with only the one author as it is designed to track several writers.

If you have more than one contributor to your blog and you want to keep a track of their activities, the Blog Metrics plugin may be worth considering. It would certainly be worth a test.

If you use WordPress for your blog then you are going to find that you need to update your blog plugins fairly frequently. Rather than update them, it can often be a good opportunity to check out what is available and whether or not there are better plugins available to do the same job.

WordPress.org is the home of many of the blog plugins available, particularly for the latest version of WordPress. The only trouble I have with visiting this site is that I often come away with far more than I went looking for.

One of the blog plugins that caught my attention today was PodPress, which as the name suggests, is a plugin that provides a range of options for publishing your podcasts including download stats. It can even manage your video podcasts as well.

WPDigsby is a blog plugin that allows you to place a widget on your sidebar. Through the widget you can communicate with others using MSN and ICQ. There are other instant messenger services covered as well.

This one large repository of blog plugins (over 2200last count) so there will be a plugin there somewhere to do the job you want. Either that or at least an upgrade to what you are currently using.

With this, you are able to learn from the masters of blogging on what works and doesn’t work – straight from their own mouths! These bloggers have loyal followers and are passionate about the subjects and their ability to blog. These are the 30 most successful bloggers in the United States and truly are the cream of the crop.

Whether you already have a blog or are merely even thinking of starting one, this is the perfect book to get true insight on the industry and the success stories within it. The list of prominent bloggers include Mary Jo Foley from All About Microsoft, Peter Rojas from Engadget, Rebecca Lieb from ClickZ, Eric T. from Duct Tape and 26 more!

The good thing about this book is that it interviews both professional bloggers who are paid to blog and other ones who merely do it as a hobby. Both have become successful in their own right and are certainly worth reading about. In the book you will learn the various motivations and factors that were vital in driving the success of these bloggers. After reading, you will have a very thorough list of things to do if you want to start your own blog and make your current blog even better.

Some blog directories are better than others when it comes to the amount of traffic they generate. There are hundreds of directories available and some of the niche directories may bring even more traffic. I have stuck to the more general directories in this listing.

Number 5: I Blog Business - This is a really good directory if your blog is a business blog or if you run a small business. There is no spam on this site due to the hand selection of listings.

Number 4: Blogoozle - Plenty of categories to choose from and a nice & easy interface. Featured blog of the day and blogs sorted by PR. If you are looking for high ranking sites, this one place to easily find them.

Number 3: Technorati - Many would place this at number one. Very popular and placing a social media button on your site helps. Reasonable traffic depending on the subject.

Number 2: BlogHub- Another popular directory that works like a social bookmarking site. Get active in the community to get extra traffic.

Number 1: blogFlux - My favorite. For some reason this directory seems to send plenty of traffic, depending on the subject matter.

Everyone has their own favorite blog directory; often it’s the first directory they joined. If you find a directory that is sending you good traffic, have a closer look and see if you can determine why. You may be able to repeat it later.

What comes first, blog SEO or Blog design? An argument that has done the rounds for a long time so I am not going to enter into it - at least not in this post.

Where blogs SEO and blog design do clash is where the design defeats the SEO processes. A good example is where poor code prevents the search engine spiders from reading your complete site.

When a spider comes to visit it reads your site page by page following all the links that they are allowed to follow. As it comes across content, it reads and indexes that content so that it can be found by a searcher. The page also starts to develop a ranking that will determine its place in the search engine results pages.  Your blog design needs to facilitate the work done by the spiders. Your blog SEO provides the links and keywords that you want the spider to concentrate.

If your blog design has any code problems then it is possible that your content will not get read and consequently not get indexed.  Not only that, the spider will probably not continue on to any of the other pages so they will not get indexed either.

There are two solutions to this problem. The first is to check to see if your site is W3C compliant. This checks the code of the page to see if there are any problems with the blog design. The second option is to use a spider simulator. This is a software program that displays a copy of your web page as the spider sees it. You can see whether or not the spider can read the whole page or if it, and where, it  breaks down.

Part of your blog SEO strategy should be to run regular checks on your pages for both compliance and spider readability. If your blog design is good, your site will pass both checks.

This is a question that all bloggers will need to face at some stage in their blogging life: Do I or do I not monetize my site and try to derive some blogging income from my blog?

The bottom line is why not? The question often raised is how.  Whether or not you run ads on your blog is always going to be a personal decision. The reality is, until you can generate a ton of traffic you are not going to generate much in the way of blogging income anyway.

One of the clever ways to generate blogging income is by not generating income at al - at least not initially. As you are not going to earn much, leave the ads out for starters. Over time, as your blog starts to get more and more traffic, start to incorporate ads - ads that are relevant to your site.

A good form of blogging income is through affiliate links. You can often find affiliate links to products that are closely related to your site. As you incorporate these ads, don’t be afraid to market them yourself either through direct blog posts or by highlighting the affiliate links.

Blogging income is a personal decision that should be made taking into account your blogs overall aim and whether or not you can incorporate ads that do not conflict with the sites overall look and feel.