Most 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“ 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.

Here are my own Blogging Tips:

1. One way to make your site popular INSTANTLY is to run a blog competition on your site. Everyone loves contests and participating especially if there is a prize to be won and the prize is worth their time and effort. Contests are the best way to get more traffic coming into your site.
2. Find relevant posts that you can link to. To do this you can search Google’s blogsearch and find blogs on your favourite topic and that is relevant to your site. Once you have found a post that you would like to comment on, send a trackback ping as discussed in my article “Increase your Blog Traffic using TRACKBACKS” This is a great way to get incoming links, hence more traffic for your blog!
3. Do you get lots of SPAM messages every day in the comments column of your blog? If yes, then Install Akismet. It controls spam and filters them seperate from the legitimate ones. This will save you so much time.
4. Get others to review your blog. There are so many forums you can resgiter with that has its own section for reviewing blogs, one of them is webmasterworld.com. Get feedback for your site on things like the navigation, look, Google Adsense optimisation, etc. You’ll be amazed at how many things others will find that could be improved on and they might be able to spot other things as well like spelling mistakes or bugs. Ask them how they see your blog and how it could be improved. You don’t have to do this online if you don’t want to, you can ask friends and family. Even a simple questionnaire filled in by real people can be more valuable to you than any other tool such as Google Analytics giving you realistic results. Try it and see. You will get some valuable ideas from others. 
5. Use your own domain name not a sub-domain of Wordpress or Blogspot.com. Read this post “why host a blog on your own domain“  Although the option of having a subdomain on these blogging platforms sounds exciting because you get a free domain you have to realise that they will ALWAYS own your domain. This means you don’t have the freedom to do what you want with it in the future. What if you want to sell it if it becomes popular or worse still what happens if the blogging platform your using goes corrupt along with your domain or is banned by a search engine? You will be the one to loose out so why take that chance. What if you want to move it to another blogging platform for example from blogger.com to Wordpress and you don’t want to lose your search engine rankings? You won’t be able to do that either.  Take my advice and host your blog on your own domain, apart from anything else it makes your blog look more professional. You’ll be glad you did in the long run.

For more information you can get a list of the top 10 Blog traffic tips here.

Well those are mine and you too are welcome to share your best blogging tip by simply posting it as a comment in the section below this page.