As of this week, MWD Web has published a new blog post every single week, consistently, for the past year.

52 shiny, lovely posts.

Hooray for us. But, more importantly, hooray for our site performance. We’ve gone from zero to hero with search engines, and seen our traffic steadily increase as we’ve gained traction and proved our relevance.

Below, some thoughts on how you can take best advantage of blogging on your own site.

Post frequently! If you’re looking to really build an audience and gain credibility with the search engines, you must post at least once a week. More often is great if you can swing it. The more reason people have to come back to your site often, the better.

Make your content interesting! Use humor, tell stories, mix it up a bit. A dry blog will not attract readership, nor will it encourage anyone to share your content with others.

Make your content relevant! For example, if your target audience is business owners, don’t ramble on too much about complicated technical things. (We admit it, we did a bit of this in our first blog site) Write posts that are informative and helpful.

Make your content readable! For goodness’ sake, don’t drone on and on in endless blocks of text. Break it up with separate paragraphs, images, headers, bullet lists, and so on.

Be original! Write with your own voice, and don’t just copy someone else’s post. If you copy and paste you’ll look foolish; and even worse, Google will smack you down for copyright violation.

Be bold! A great way to encourage conversation is to take a stand on some issue and defend your position. Take a look at chuckblakeman.com – the guy doesn’t pull any punches, and he gets some lively discussions going in his comments.

Be responsive! If someone comments on your post, take the time to write them a quick note back. This is the same approach as you would take on Facebook or Twitter. Engaging with your visitors gives your company a human touch, and gives you credence far beyond just a stream of one-way posts.

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