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Common blog elements
General, Blogging Tools and Services September 12th, 2007
Visited 3605 times, 2 so far todayMost blogs use the following standard features:
Author byline
You will notice on some blogs they include the name of the person who wrote the post. This is a default setting know as the author byline. You can choose to remove the author byline by deleting the code from the template file.
Permalink
Short term for “permanent link,” this is the link you see in your browsers address bar. To read more about permalinks and how to create SEO titles using permalinks click here
Blogroll
The blogroll is a standard add on with every new theme but you can remove it if you don’t want it on your site. Basically a Blogroll lists the blogger’s favourite blogs in the sidebar. What I usually do is customise the blogroll by delete the existing blogs there and overwrite them with my own favourite blogs. They can be easily managed and edited in the admin control panel of your blog.
Categories
A few blogging platforms like Wordpress allow the blogger to create and assign categories
to blog entries. These categories are listed in the sidebar, so that visitors can browse the categories they are interested in. When the category is clicked it will show all the posts grouped under that specific category. You can even have sub-categories to break things down.
Comments
You can allow comments to appear under published posts and set a rule where by only the administrator is allowed to approve the comment before it appears on the site. Comments are a great way to build content on a site and to connect with your readers.
Trackbacks
I published an article about trackbacks called “Increase your Blog Traffic using TRACKBACKS“Â and is well worth a read especially if you have never heard of trackbacks before.
What usually happens is you the blogger will read a post on another blog site and if you have something to say about that post then you leave a comment right? Well with a trackback, instead of leaving a comment on THEIR site you leave a comment on YOUR site. To find out how to send a trackback and how to use them effectively, read “Increase your Blog Traffic using TRACKBACKS”
Something else you should know is that comments or trackbacks will not give you better search engine ranking – why? Because external links in the comments column including Trackbacks do not contribute to your Google Pagerank or any other search engine page rank. Although you might think this is not fair the one good thing to come out of it is the incoming links from other blogs that increases your blog traffic which is what you want.
Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
A final element common to most blogs is the Really Simple Syndication link (RSS). It’s a really clever technique used for notifying new content at a website. An example of a RSS feed is http://bloggerholic.com/feed. This feed contains frequently updated content which you can subscribe to if you want to, it is added to the Common Feed List. Updated information from the feed is automatically downloaded to your computer and can be viewed in Internet Explorer and other programs. The format of the information that appears is up to you as you can customise it to show full text or a summary. You can also choose how many posts you want the RSS to show. In my example it shows the 10 most recent posts. It displays the title, link and the full body of the content.
