Blog – a short form of Weblog is generally meant for leaving the published topic for open discussion to get relevant comments. The important difference between blog and the content site is the commenting system which makes the blog more powerful tool. Blog can be a personal blog, company’s official blog, video blog, music blog or an art blog depending on the purpose. Microblogging is another kind of blogging platform allows the users to publish very short posts with limited number of characters.
Blogger is a simple example for blogging platform and Twitter is an example for microblogging platform.
Structure of a Blog
- Blog contains post and the posts are displayed in the reverse chronological order, that means the latest post is shown first when displayed in a browser.
- Blog home page is normally a HTML page contains limited number of posts. Normally recent 10 posts are shown in one HTML page.
- Blog content can be archived which allows the user to choose from any previous period.
- You can categorize your blog posts into various categories to be displayed as a separate category HTML page.
- Normally blog shows the author name and allows the user to enter comments on the topic.
- Commenting can be offered with or without approval mechanism to avoid spamming.
- Commenting can also be offered only for the registered users of the blog.
Blog is an Index of Your Website
Though blogs can be handled independently the best way to use a blog is to publish important announcements or events of your main site. The interest here should be to drive traffic to your main site with attractive announcements in a blog. For example if you are running a product site selling home appliances, then you can start a blog of same sub-domain to announce festival time discounts.
Salient Features of a Blog
Blogging platforms like Blogger are becoming more famous due to the ease of use and the simple additional features a blog site can have compared to a content site.
1. Template Themes
The beauty of a blog is that it can be customized into any kind of layouts without much difficulty. Webmasters can use the standard templates offered by the service provider or use any kind of plugins to change the theme of their blog.
2. RSS Feed
Blog feed is an simple way for webmasters to provide the updated content directly to the users mailbox. If an user likes your blog and subscribe to your feed then he need not to visit your blog every time see what is updated and receive every single new post in his mailbox. Blog feed is simple way to promote your content and various feed readers will automatically index your content and show it in the search engines independently.
3. Archive and Category
Same blog post can be added into multiple categories within a blog which helps to create a multiple instances of a same content without duplication. Search engines will index different category pages along with individual post URLs which will give boost to your search engine traffic. Categories will also help the users to find relevant content within the particular category.
Blog archiving allows you to archive your old content mostly based on the month of publishing. Every archived pages will also be indexed by the search engines separately and works exactly like a blog category.
4. Commenting System
Blog contains built-in comment management system to receive the responses from the users. This enables the webmasters to clarify the content and provide additional inputs without changing and republishing the original post content.
5. Read More Element
Blog posts can be displayed with one or two paragraph with a continue or read more link so that the interested users will click on the link to read the full content.
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