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A considerable portion of my consulting time has recently revolved around the

optmization of corporate blogs (or the addition of blogs to revamped sites). As

usual, I find a pattern emerging in the strategies that need attention and the

pitfalls that must be avoided. So, rather than charging $400 an hour to give

advice on the subject, I thought it would be valuable to share many of the most

common pieces of advice here on the blog (business part of Rand fights with open

source Rand, but loses, as usual).

1. Choose the Right Blog Software (or Custom Build)
The right blog CMS makes a big difference. If you want to set yourself

apart, I recommend creating a custom blog solution - one that can be completely

customized to your users. In most cases, WordPress, Blogger, MovableType or

Typepad will suffice, but building from scratch allows you to be very creative

with functionality and formatting. The best CMS is something that's easy for the

writer(s) to use and brings together the features that allow the blog to flourish.

Think about how you want comments, archiving, sub-pages, categorization, multiple

feeds and user accounts to operate in order to narrow down your choices.

OpenSourceCMS is a very good tool to help you select a software if you go that

route.
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2. Host Your Blog Directly on Your Domain
Hosting your blog on a different domain from your primary site is one of the

worst mistakes you can make. A blog on your domain can attract links, attention,

publicity, trust and search rankings - by keeping the blog on a separate domain,

you shoot yourself in the foot. From worst to best, your options are - Hosted (on

a solution like Blogspot or Wordpress), on a unique domain (at least you can 301

it in the future), on a subdomain (these can be treated as unique from the primary

domain by the engines) and as a sub-section of the primary domain (in a subfolder

or page - this is the best solution).
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3. Write Title Tags with Two Audiences in Mind
First and foremost, you're writing a title tag for the people who will visit

your site or have a subscription to your feed. Title tags that are short, snappy,

on-topic and catchy are imperative. You also want to think about search engines

when you title your posts, since the engines can help to drive traffic to your

blog. A great way to do this is to write the post and the title first, then run a

few searches at Overture, WordTracker & KeywordDiscovery to see if there is a

phrasing or ordering that can better help you to target "searched for" terms.
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4. Participate at Related Forums & Blogs
Whatever industry or niche you're in, there are bloggers, forums and an

online community that's already active. Depending on the specificity of your

focus, you may need to think one or two levels broader than your own content to

find a large community, but with the size of the participatory web today, even the

highly specialized content areas receive attention. A great way to find out who

these people are is to use Technorati to conduct searches, then sort by number of

links (authority). Del.icio.us tags are also very useful in this process, as are

straight searches at the engines (Ask.com's blog search in particular is of very

good quality).
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5. Tag Your Content
Technorati is the first place that you should be tagging posts. I actually

recommend having the tags right on your page, pointing to the Technorati searches

that you're targeting. There are other good places to ping - del.icio.us and

Flickr being the two most obvious (the only other one is Blogmarks, which is much

smaller). Tagging content can also be valuable to help give you a "bump" towards

getting traffic from big sites like Reddit, Digg & StumbleUpon (which requires

that you download the toolbar, but trust me - it's worth it). You DO NOT want to

submit every post to these sites, but that one out of twenty (see tactic #18) is

worth your while.
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6. Launch Without Comments (and Add Them Later)
There's something sad about a blog with 0 comments on every post. It feels

dead, empty and unpopular. Luckily, there's an easy solution - don't offer the

ability to post comments on the blog and no one will know that you only get 20