Do’s

• Know What You’re Doing. A blog should have crystal clear hierarchy and links and should
preferably be easy to navigate.
• A site map is required to help the users go around
your site and in case the site map has more than
100 links, then it is advisable to break it into
several pages to avoid clutter.
• Do join a blog community, and check out other bloggers and follow discussion threads. Come up with essential and precise keywords and make sure that your website features relevant and informative content.
• The Google crawler will not recognize text hidden in the images, so
when describing important names, keywords or links; stick with plain
text.
• The TITLE and ALT tags should be descriptive and accurate and the
website should have no broken links or incorrect HTML.
• Dynamic pages (the URL consisting of a ‘?’ character) should be kept
to a minimum as not every search engine spider is able to crawl them.
• Do fellowship with other bloggers. The robots.txt file on your web server should be current and should
not block the Googlebot crawler. This file tells crawlers which
directories can or cannot be crawled. Keep It Fresh, Do commit to a regular posting schedule
Don’ts

 
• Choose the right tool. When making a site, do not cheat your users, i.e. those people who
will surf your blogs. Do not provide them with irrelevant content or
present them with any fraudulent schemes.
• Avoid tricks or link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking.
• Don’t ignore comments visitors make on your blog posts. Do not employ hidden texts or hidden links.
• Google frowns upon blogs using cloaking
technique. Hence, it is advisable to avoid that.
• Automated queries should not be sent to Google.
• Avoid stuffing pages with irrelevant words and
content. Also don’t create multiple pages, subdomains,
or domains with significantly duplicate content.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines or other “cookie
cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with hardly any original
content.

Keep your readers happy-  Effective Blog Posting

An excellent article i found on effective blog posting .

 The Effect of posting regularity

During my research into effective blog posting, one point came up time and time again:

As soon as bloggers reduced their posting frequency or stopped posting altogether their website traffic began to drop off, and their search engine rankings began to slide.

On the opposite side of the coin, posting too many times in one day seemed to have the same effect…

The general consensus for effective posting seemed to be one of consistency; of creating a blogging schedule and sticking to it. For example, one or two posts per week of at least 200 words, and one or two posts of 500 words or more.

The shorter posts could be a quick note referencing an interesting article or blog post you have found, while the longer posts could be an explanation of some particular procedure or a review of a product or service. The longer posts are the ones to concentrate your search engine optimization efforts on as they are more likely to be indexed and ranked.

 Reveal Some of Your Personality

People visit blogs regularly because they form an affinity with the blogger. They either agree or disagree with the blogger, but if they respect the blogger’s opinions, they keep coming back for more.

Being too personable has the opposite affect. People are not interested in your personal life, or your possessions. They are interested in your opinions and advice. This means taking a stand on issues and products and not bragging about your latest Porche or complaining about your latest misfortune!

If you like, or don’t like something say so, but explain your reasons. Your personality will show through as regular readers begin to understand your likes and dislikes. This is when some readers will begin to form an affinity with you. Others will decide they don’t like you and stop visiting your blog… You will get the odd one who sticks around to ruffle your feathers, much like a forum troll – just delete their comments and hope they get the message.

 Don’t Leave Your Posts Isolated

Internal linking plays an important role in search engine optimization. When you write a post link it to other related posts. Make sure you use the main keyword phrase of the post you are linking to in the hyperlink.

For example if you were writing a post about “green widgets” and had previously written a post about “blue widgets” you could reference your “blue widgets” post by creating a link to it, the html code of your link would look like this:

<a href=”http://www.your-blog.com/widgets/blue-widgets.php”>blue widgets</a>

When you are write a post using WordPress simply highlight the text you want included in the hyperlink, click the “Insert/Edit Link” button and a popup is displayed where you can enter the link URL (http://www.your-blog.com/widgets/blue-widgets.php in the example) and click the insert button.

This serves two purposes:

1. It creates a back link to the blue widgets post giving your search engine optimization for that post a slight boost.
    
2. It gives your reader a link to another related article which they will probably go and read, and so you get an extra opportunity to impress your reader and ultimately expose them to your advertisements.

Your primary goal in improving readership and rankings is to keep your readers happy. Keeping the search engines happy is secondary. You might employ every SEO trick in the book, but once your readers lose interest they will stop visiting your blog. This means you stop getting return traffic, new back links and bookmarks. The search engines will soon notice this reduced activity and your rankings will begin to slide.