I’m not just talking about how your blog looks. The actual code behind the design has a much bigger impact on your online success than you might guess.

Wendy of eMoms at Home did a great writeup on ProBlogger yesterday where she talked about the importance of a well-coded blog template and described the phenomenal results she saw when I implemented a much better coded them for her (the number of people that Google sent her doubled the next day). Wendy explored the reasons for that and the result was the ProBlogger post.

I want to go into a little more background here so that you’ll understand why the theme change made such a huge difference. Most people choose a blog theme based strictly on how it looks (and that’s definitely a valid concern, since it’s setting the tone for your blog) but aren’t aware that the behind-the-scenes details of the code can drastically affect the way the search engines “feel” about your blog.

I have visited plenty of other blog websites and seen a lot of things I like… but also a lot of potential that’s not being used. Many people have the right idea when it comes to blogging, but a lot of bloggers (particularly beginners) are missing key ingredients that make blogs that really buzz!

I’m sure you can relate to this, and have visited blog sites that are as dead as a doornail. You’ve also probably visited blogs that haven’t seen any updates for months or years. Clearly they’re still getting traffic (you’re there, right?), but they’re not using it in any kind of useful way.

So, how do you generate buzz on your blog website once you attract the traffic? It all comes down to a few simple points: presentation, writing style and topic choices.

As you know, creating a blog can be lots of fun. It’s also a lot of hard work, though, and that’s why it’s important to generate plenty of traffic to your site. After all, there’s nothing worse than pouring your heart and soul into your blog, only to discover that nobody is visiting!

So now for the $64,000 question. How does you effectively attract people to your blog? How do you actually do this and build up a blog site that will be known to many within a relatively short amount of time?

It’s a fact that writing for the web is entirely different from writing for print. When it comes to writing your blog articles, you need to keep in mind a number of rules that make it easier for your readers.

You’ll need to forget (or at least temporarily ignore) some of what you’ve learned about writing for print, because as you will soon discover, writing for the web is a totally different game altogether!

To prove my point, think for a moment about the material you read online. What do you find most attractive? What turns you off? Seriously, take a minute to think about it.

Do you know why people would want to use RSS to subscribe to your blog? Hint: you may think it’s because of convenience (and it is, in part), but there’s more at work here. An excellent “aha” moment courtesy of Copyblogger:

The primary benefit is not that RSS

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