Where is blogging going?

While surfing the web, I mainly focus on private and personal sites, as well as design sites. Most of them are established as a blog or a blog has been integrated into the site, using a blogging system, such as Wordpress or Textpattern.

I wonder these days, where blogging is going right now.

The term “Monetizing” occurs very often, and so do “Advertising” and “Ranking”. As an owner of a company blog, you want your blog to be as highly ranked as possible among the important search engines; Google and so on. Some sites offers various tips how to rank your site higher, and many private users are trying to stick to them in order to find a place in at least the top 3 in the list. Private sites begin to sell link spots on their sites and some seem to buy links on other sites to gain referrals.

An article, written by Wendy Piersall of EMoms at Home offers some advice about SEO of blogs. The question is: How can your blog layout influence your ranking?

One advice is you should structure your theme in a way that makes the post content appear before the other contents such as sidebars and other items. Further mention is made of the importance of titles. Titles should be properly used with the common <h1>,<h2> and similar tags so that they can be found by search engines easier. My question here: Does image replacement have any effect on that? The title is still contained in the source code, despite of an image shown in the frontend of the website (At least, if you are using the well-known CSS image-replacement trick).

In the last part of the article, it is even mentioned, that search engines like blogs, which are updated more often.

Another SEO tip that fits in well with the general goals of blogging is to regularly write posts that focus on a very specific topic. “Regularly” because the search engines seem to follow blogs more if they are regularly updated (and of course that’s ideal for your readers, too!); “very specific topic” because it helps both search engines and readers figure out quickly and accurately what the point of the post is.

Visitors count

My personal impression is that hits count, but in order to get them, it is very important to cater for your visitors. I was very reluctant to read and comment on a post on a private site, which had a title similar to “My cheap holidays”. The post contained links to some travel site, and at the bottom it said “Sponsored by PPP”. This blog will not get any links from me, because I do not tend to read content that is written in order to earn a few bucks. Google ads are are sometimes disturbing too, but they do not have an impact on the content as long as they are well-placed on the blog.
I for myself think one should try and combine a correctly coded layout with rememberable content. Lend your visitor a hand…