The whole point of a blog is that the author, or blogger, wants to share something. What they’re sharing could be anything, from 401K investment advice to tips on bathing your cat without incurring major injury. There is a dizzying array of topics that people blog about, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that all bloggers have one thing in common: they want the information they’re providing to reach readers. Otherwise, what’s the point of having a blog to begin with?

There are many ways to go about building a blog, but generally your top priority is going to be making what you have to say easily accessible to your readership. If no one’s visiting your site to read your brilliant account of backpacking in Paraguay, then you’re essentially talking to yourself.

That’s why I’m here today — to discuss something that many bloggers seem to take for granted, the RSS feed. Dustin wrote a great post about the basics of RSS here, so I won’t go into the nuts and bolts of syndication. Instead, I’ll take it a step further and talk about the finer points of linking to your RSS feed.

I can tell you from personal experience that if I stumble upon a website with content that I find interesting or useful, you’ve got about thirty seconds for me to locate the link to your feed before I get annoyed and leave. I don’t like having to search the text of your page for the words “subscribe” or “syndication,” and if I’ve gone through all that and still can’t find your feed, you’ve lost me as a reader. The link to your RSS feed needs to be clearly marked for the world to see and subscribe to. If folks can’t find it, no one will subscribe, and you’ll be left staring woefully at your dwindling web stats.

With that scenario in mind, I’d like to introduce you to my friend the RSS icon:

This little guy is pretty much the standard for clearly marking the link to your blog’s feed. Most people know it, and they look for it. When it’s not there readers get confused, then annoyed, then they navigate away from your page. This standard is a good thing, because it creates a common navigation between your site and the rest of the internet — no longer are we left to scroll through blogs in vain looking for a subscribe here link, because we know what to look for. You even have a plethora of options when it comes to stylizing your icon to fit the look and feel of your blog.

Now, let’s talk about placement. You generally want your feed link at the top of your page, usually near the top of your sidebar. Look over to the right corner of this very page – see how easy it is to find the RSS feed for the Writer’s Technology Companion? Dustin has done a good job of placing his feed icon in a location where it’s hard to miss, and goes a step further by putting a second link at the bottom of every post. If someone wants to subscribe to his blog, they don’t need to hunt all over for the link.

Many prefab blogging services, such as Blogspot and Blogger, do not clearly mark your feed by default, instead creating a little, nondescript link way down at the bottom of your page that says “Subscribe to: Posts.” This is very difficult for potential subscribers to spot, and unless they’re searching your text for the word “subscribe,” they’re not going to see it.

There are many ways to add a more obvious feed link to your blog, but if you’re not comfortable getting elbow deep in html, I recommend using a feed service like FeedBurner. They’ll let you create a feed for your site with all sorts of nifty features, and then will provide instructions on how to add the code to whatever blog platform you happen to be using. Easy! Feed services also tell you how many people have subscribed to your site, so you’ll be able to see firsthand how the placement of your feed link is affecting your returning readership.

Please be kind and clearly mark your RSS link. You’ll save your blog’s visitors a lot of time in superfluous page scrolling!

Stephanie Stiavetti is a feature writer, copywriter, and all around technical savant. Having spent the last decade ensconced in both the editorial and computer industries, she’s comfortable in either world and often combines the two. Her areas of expertise are food, cooking, nutrition, health/wellness, technology, and the writing lifestyle, though if she had her druthers, she would spend 100% of her time writing about her culinary exploits. Read more about her and her work at Wasabimon.

Nobody outside of Google knows exactly how Google ranks it’s search results. It’s a closely-guarded trade secret. But the general outlines are pretty well-known, if not the exact algorithm. Google has thousands of computers running programs called “‘bots” (short for “robots”) or “spiders” that pick a known page, index it, follow all the links on the page, index the pages linked to, follow links on those pages, index the new set of pages, and so on.

As Google’s ‘bots “crawl” the web, they assign each page a PageRank, Google’s estimation of the importance of the page. This figure is arrived at by looking at the keywords on the page, the number of times and the placement of the keywords (which help determine what the main topics covered by the page are), the relation between those keywords, and the relation of the page to other pages on the web. The last part is calculated according to the number of other sites that link to a page, and their PageRank.

Let’s say you write books about fishing. On a page about your book, “Trout Fishing in Kansas”, the words “trout”, “fishing”, and “Kansas” are going to be important keywords — you’ll have used them a lot, they’ll be in the page’s title, headings, and sub-headings, and there may be links to other pages on the web about trout, fishing, and Kansas.

If a lot of other sites that Google has already determined are about trout, fishing, or Kansas link to your site, Google assumes that you must know a thing or two about those topics — if the Kansas Trout Fishing Commission thinks your page is worth linking to, Google figures, you must be an expert. And therefore people searching for information on Kansas trout fishing would probably want to find your site — as opposed, say, to a Kansas City, MO, bookstore that sells Trout Fishing in America.

Knowing that, it’s pretty clear what you have to do to assure a strong showing for your site in Google search results:

• Write good content: As they say on the web, content is king. Writing strong content about your chosen topics will give Google lots of keywords to work with, and encourage other sites to link to you.
• Write good headings and sub-heads: Google assumes that anything marked as a header (with header tags like “h2” and “h3”) are more likely to be keywords, and rates them more highly. Choose descriptive titles for your posts rather than obscure ones’.
  • Better - The Difficulties of Trout Fishing on the Missouri River
  • Worse -Them Buggers Ain’t Biting!
• Write descriptive link text: Google gives more weight to keywords it finds in links, so when linking to other sites, describe the other site’s content well. Don’t write “click here”, write “visit Fishing World to buy Acme Fishing Line”.
• Get linked to: The more relevant links Google finds to your site, the higher your site will appear in search results, so make sure your content is worth linking to and make sure you promote it so other web writers in your niche see it.
• Put keywords in your page’s title: Every page has a title that appears at the very top of your web browser when you visit it. Most blog software will put the site’s title and the post’s title into the page title, like this “Getting Noticed by Google — Writer’s Technology Companion”. Keep that in mind when naming your site — pick something like “Mary Ann Whiting, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer” rather than “Mary’s Site”.
• Update regularly: The more often Google indexes your site, the better. Google looks at the update frequency to determine hw often it needs to revisit the site. If you update daily, it’s going to come back more often than if you update every couple of months when you feel like it. Try to update at least once every week or so, to keep Google coming back often.

There are a lot of companies out there that offer “SEO”, “Search Engine Optimization”, services. While some of these do a pretty good job (mostly by doing the kind of stuff I talk about above), they’re really intended for corporate sites (and charge accordingly!). Beware of sites that offer cheap SEO services to end users — most of them a) don’t work, and b) use questionable tactics that not only won’t work but could get your site delisted from Google entirely.

Here are some tactics that don’t work and could actually hurt your search ranking with Google:

• Getting links from unrelated sites: It pays to be selective about who you try to get to link to you. If the site isn’t well-established for your particular keywords, it’s not going to give you much of a boost. Likewise if a page is just a bunch of links.
• Link farms: Some services offer to get your site tons of links, for a fee. They build “link farms”, interlinked sets of pages with only links to sites that have bought links. Google looks unkindly on this and you’ll get dinged for it.
• Link-swapping or buying links: There are a number of link-swapping services (“you link to me, I’ll link to you”); Google tends to ignore links on sites in link-swapping groups (including non-swapped links) and may actively punish sites hosting swapped links (which means you). Same for ad networks that allow you to buy text links on other sites — which is especially galling since Google’s AdWords program is essentially a service that allows you to buy text links on other sites! But Google is the boss, here, so save your money and focus on content.
• Loading your page with invisible keywords: In olden days, people would put in hundreds of keywords at the bottom of their page, setting the text color to be the same as the background color. Search engines don’t see text color, the thinking went, so they’d see (and index) the text but nobody else would. All the search engines are wise to this, and will ding you for it.

There are tricks that will work — for a little while, until Google and the other search engines get wise to it and change how they rank pages. It’s far better to focus on writing good stuff for your human visitors and let your site grow organically than to waste time, effort, and money trying to write for the computers at Google. It might take a little longer, but if you have a strong site with well-defined keywords and people find your site useful enough to link to, you’ll gradually move up the search rankings to the top.

To send files via FTP, you need an FTP client, software explicitly designed for FTP. I like FileZIlla — it’s free, easy to use, and stable. You also need to make sure your webhost offers an FTP account with your hosting package — most paid hosts do, but some free webhosts only allow uploading files through their own web-based control panel. Avoid them.

Your webhost should have given you an FTP address to use. Usually this is ftp.yourdomain.com, but not always, so check. Also check your username and password in your hosting account’s preferences; it’s usually the same as the username and password you use to login to your hosting account, but again, not always. Many webhosts allow you to set up multiple FTP accounts (the idea being, on a large site with many administrators, you might want to allow one person access to only one directory, and another access to the entire site). If so, you can create an account in your administration panel at your host’s site, and select your won username and password.

Once you have these three pieces of information, you can set up your FTP client. Using FileZilla, select “File” and then “Site Manager”. A new window will pop up; click the “New Site” button and enter your FTP address in the “Host Name” blank. Select “Normal” from the “Logontype” drop-down, then enter your username and password. Hit “OK” to save it, or “Connect” if you’re ready to connect right now (this will also save your settings).

FileZilla will connect to your site and show the folders and files in the right-hand pane when it’s connected. You can select and open folders just like you would on your computer; to go back, click the folder with the “up” arrow at the top of the directory. On the left, you can drill down to the folder on your computer you want to upload files from. Select a folder or a bunch of files on your computer, and either right-click and select “Upload” or drag-and-drop them into the right-hand pane. To download files, do the reverse — select the file on the right-hand side and right-click and select “Download” or drag them into the left-hand window.

Moving large numbers of files — such as downloading the entire site to make a local backup — can take a while, and usually you can’t do anything else with the program while it’s uploading or downloading files. Moving one or two small files will go almost instantaneously.

I’ll be honest, I’m still getting a feel for what Social|Median does and how it works. It’s still in private “alpha” release, which means they’re still adding features and testing things out — it’s far from a finished product. That said, I was able to easily set up a channel of writing news, which Social|Median populated automatically with a bunch of good sites (to which I was able to add a few of my own choosing), and the email alerts I’m getting from that channel have had pretty consistently good stuff.

If you’d like to check out Social|Median for yourself, I have 5 invites to the private alpha to give away. Email me via the contact page and I’ll email an invite code to the first 5 people who ask.

I try to do all my web writing for the week in two blocks of uninterrupted time. That way I can relax and focus on other things the rest of the week. In WordPress, you can schedule posts days, weeks, even months and years ahead of time, and they’ll go live automatically when that time comes.

If you’re getting ready to launch a new blog, do the same thing, only more so: write a month’s worth — or more — of content to launch with. Schedule two or three posts a week as far in advance as you can. Getting a new site off the ground can be challenging, and until you settle into a routine it can be hard to know how much time it will take. If you launch your site and something important comes up, it may sit with no content for days or weeks, doing nobody any good.

Making sure the first couple of months are well-stocked can take a lot of pressure off, allowing you to focus on building relationships with other bloggers, promoting your site, and of course doing the writing that is your life’s blood. My goal before launching this site was 100 posts “in the can” — more than half a year’s worth (at 3 posts per week). Of course, I can and do slot in new material in response to anything that happens in those first several months.

Another time to pre-write a lot is before a vacation or any other long time away from your site. Get two week’s worth of posts in the can before you take a week’s vacation — one week for the week you’re gone, and one week for the week you come back. That way, there’s no pressure to take up 100% of your daily life when you return from your vacation — and if, as often happens, you come back with Hungarian Death Flu or Angolan Sneezing Sickness, you’ll have time to recover without worrying about your site.

The core of your site should show you and your talents off in the best possible light, and as thoroughly as possible:

• Your bio: A short description of who you are, your history, and your writing. Freelancers seeking clients might also include a description of work they’ve done, links to client sites, or even a resume.
• Your portfolio: At the very least, a list of your books, articles, and other published work. If possible, include samples or clips, as well as links to work published online.
• News and updates: A blog or other system of posting upcoming events, recent publications, major life changes, what you’re working on, your thoughts, and whatever else strikes your fancy that you think readers would be interested in.
• A way to contact you: Either post your email and mailing address somewhere, or include a “Contact Me” page with a form for sending email and an address for sending mail. If you’re hesitant to include your home address, use a PO Box, or a publisher’s or agent’s address.

Other information you might wish to include:

• Testimonials or blurbs: If you do client work, ask your best clients to write testimonials you can post on the website. If you have book jacket blurbs, post some of those.
• Services offered: Freelancers should list what, exactly, they do: copyediting, direct response, newsletters, technical manuals, etc.. If you have fixed rates, list them, but many freelancers set rates on a per-job basis and can leave rates out of their description.
• Links: A page or sidebar list with links to other authors in your niche, information on the topics you write on, or general writing information. Or all three — whatever sites you use and recommend.
• Press kit: A summary page and a few images can be useful if you’re seeking any kind of press coverage. Make sure you have the right to distribute the images — even if they are pictures of you, the photographer who took them has certain rights under copyright law.

Because you’re not limited by space, you can expand your site at will, adding sections when the need arises. That said, it’s a good idea to have a rough plan of what information you want t include on your website from the start, so that you don’t end up cluttering your site by haphazardly adding new sections and information.

Well, the good news and the bad news is that there’s no real limit to what you can or should write in your blog. You’re a writer — you can be as wide-ranging or as focused as you want. There are fantasy novelists who write about their pets, academics who write about their vacations, tech journalists who write about the latest books they’ve read, and so on.

There’s no reason to feel limited by your particular niche, either. A blog might be where you write your thoughts on politics, though your published work is all lyrical poetry.

Here are some rough ideas about what works well for writers:

• Write about your life: Describe your creative process, the research you’re doing, the interviews you’ve performed, the book tour you’re on, the life you lead as a writer — give your readers a nuts-and-bolts, behind-the-scenes look at what you do in your daily life as a writer.
• Write about writing: Offer advice for other writers and would-be writers to help them become better at their craft.
• Offer tips and advice in your niche: If you’re a how-to writer, post tips, tricks, and hacks your audience can use while they wait for your next column or book to come out. For example, if you write about photography, offer Photoshop tips, or how to select a good telephoto lens, or where the best places to take nature photos are in your state.
• Describe your non-writing life: Talk about things that happen to you when you’re not writing — the antics of your loved ones, your frustrations with the grocery store clerk, your volunteer activities.
• Write book or product reviews: Tell your readers about other books in your field that you recommend — or about your own reading obsessions outside of your genre. Or review the software, hardware, gadgets, cooking utensils, pens, or other things you use and love (or hate).
• Write about whatever you don’t write about professionally: If you write travel articles, write about dog breeding, or trainspotting. If you write fantasy novels, write about gardening — whatever you’re interested in that isn’t part of your writing life. (It just might become a new specialty!)
• Post work you don’t plan to sell: If you’re a novelist, post short short stories, or poems, or personal essays; if you’re a journalist, post “short take” pieces or op-eds about the news you cover.
• Post excerpts: I saved this one for last because while it seems like a natural thing to do, it has risks. Since most publishers want some sort of exclusivity, posting your work-in-progress or finished work you hope to sell might severely limit the market for your work. You’ll have to put some extra effort into convincing a publisher that there’s a solid reason to pay you for work that people can get for free from your site. Some authors have done this and been wildly successful — some have even sold complete novels they’ve posted publicly as they wrote them, but you have to decide if you have what it takes to pull that off and if you can afford to be limited.

If you update your site only when a new book is published, you’re asking a lot of your readers — it might be two years before there’s anything new to look at on your site. They certainly aren’t going to bookmark your site if they don’t expect anything to change for months or years.

A blog can be updated every week or so, several times a week, daily, or even throughout the day, depending on your schedule and how much you like doing it and what kind of material you’re posting. As it happens, the frequency with which your site is updated is one of the factors Google and other search engines look at to determine how highly to rank your site (and thus, how close to the first page it comes up when people search for topics covered on your site).

More importantly, blogging regularly gives your audience a reason to come back, and helps build a feeling of connection between you and your readers. People are genuinely interested in the lives of the authors they like, and letting them see into your creative mind a little will turn casual readers into life-long fans. Blogging also gives new readers a taste of your style before they invest their time and money into reading your work. And if you write for periodicals, you can announce where your latest pieces can be found for people who might not otherwise read those magazines or journals.

Blogging is also a chance to showcase your abilities if you’re a freelance copywriter. Having a regularly updated blog shows your ability to write within a fixed time-frame, and if it’s good, all the better. Blogging can also give potential clients an insight into what kind of person you are and whether you would be easy to work with given their particular personalities and workplace environments.

So the short answer is, if you’re a writer, you definitely want to keep a blog on your website.

Being on the Web means your work is available at any time and from anywhere. You can store writing samples and offer editors and publishers a link to all of your work instead of just 2 or 3 clips. Potential clients can find out about you and your work through search engines. You can build up lasting relationships with your audience, keeping them informed of new work coming out and new projects you’re undertaking.

The Internet is central to the way business — including publishing — is done today. If you’re serious about writing, and you’re serious about the business of writing, building a solid web presence is easily the second most important thing you can do — other than writing itself.