SEOmoz Offers Twenty One Traffic Building Tips

Posted on August 31, 2006

There are so many sources for blog advice and tips these days that blogger newsbies will have plenty of resources to choose from. Another list of tips comes from the SEOmoz blog. The list includes a several interesting suggestions. One suggestion that is often echoed by many professional bloggers is to get your own domain name.

Hosting your blog on a different domain from your primary site is one of the worst mistakes you can make. A blog on your domain can attract links, attention, publicity, trust and search rankings - by keeping the blog on a separate domain, you shoot yourself in the foot. From worst to best, your options are - Hosted (on a solution like Blogspot or Wordpress), on a unique domain (at least you can 301 it in the future), on a subdomain (these can be treated as unique from the primary domain by the engines) and as a sub-section of the primary domain (in a subfolder or page - this is the best solution).

Another tip says not to blog about every meme that comes your way.

Don't Jump on the Bandwagon
Some memes are worthy of being talked about by every blogger in the space, but most aren't. Just because there's huge news in your industry or niche DOES NOT mean you need to be covering it, or even mentioning it (though it can be valuable to link to it as an aside, just to integrate a shared experience into your unique content). Many of the best blogs online DO talk about the big trends - this is because they're already popular, established and are counted on to be a source of news for the community. If you're launching a new blog, you need to show people in your space that you can offer something unique, different and valuable - not just the same story from your point of view. This is less important in spaces where there are very few bloggers and little online coverage and much more in spaces that are overwhelmed with blogs (like search, or anything else tech-related).

That's partially true. However, if you want to get noticed it does help to give your unique opinion about a popular meme or popular news item now and then. Don't be turned off just because 1,000 other bloggers have already given their say. The seomoz.org tips post also has some good advice about attending blogger conferences, writing titles, using tags, using guest bloggers and archiving properly.