Starting a blog is very easy. All you need to do is get a free account at Blogger or WordPress, choose a name, pick a theme and start posting. But making that blog popular and driving traffic to it is the most difficult part. Yet if done properly, it is not that complicated to create a popular blog. What you need to remember is that every blog needs good content. Do not expect to receive thousand of organic traffic to your blog if you do not have something useful to offer to your viewers. Remember, visitors need a reason(s) to come to your blog.

So what should you do to make your blog popular?

1. Add Meta Tags - use an automatic online meta tag generator to create some good meta description and tag code for your blog. Paste that code into your blog so that search engines can know what your blog is about.
2. Link Building - get a lot of backlinks for your blog. But make sure that most of these backlinks are from relevant sites. Do not go looking for links from medicine sites when your blog is about movies.
3. Social Bookmarking Sites - whenever you publish a new post on your blog, make sure to submit it to major bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit etc. These sites can drive a lot of traffic!
4. Forums - they are a great way to get involved into direct marketing. Communicate with other members and promote your blog on different forums (but don't spam!).
5. Blog Comments - Commenting is still a popular way to increase popularity. It helps you in getting backlinks, building relationships with other bloggers and driving traffic.

These were some very basic tips to make your blog popular. There are other tips as well that can be more effective but beginners need to start with these first.

Posted by Dan at SEO for Blogging.
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As most of you may already know, Google has recently introduced a new favicon. Several users submitted their designs for Google's new favicon recently and Google has picked the one that it liked the best. The final version is slightly modified.

Without further delay, let me show you the new favicon if you have not seen it yet.
I think it looks decent enough. To tell you the truth, I loved the first and original favicon from Google. It was simple and just pleasing to the eye. This new favicon has too many colors (Chrome's colors).

So what do you guys think? Love it or hate it?

Posted by Dan at SEO for Blogging.
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Today is the last day of 2008 and like every year, Google posted an entry on their blog which summarizes their blogging activity. They have posted some stats on how their blog's popularity has increased. Google Blog is getting visitors from all over the world. Also, this year, the Google team has posted 23% more posts than the last year.

Also, I was astonished to see that Google has launched 44 new blogs this year!

Furthermore, their post also describes some major news and products that they have talked about in their blog. If I were you, I would definitely check out this post and see what Google had been doing in 2008.

Happy New Year!

Posted by Dan at SEO for Blogging.
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The main reason behind Google's success is probably that it cares about what others think. It likes to takes suggestions from its regular users and then use them to its advantage. Many other sites and companies say about take suggestions but they don't usually implement them. Google is a search engine that does and that's why it is so successful.

One way Google likes to hear from its users is through Google Help Forums. It is a place where users can ask questions. Senior users with good knowledge about Google's products can help new members solve problems.

To improve user experience better, Google announced on its blog that it has introduced some new features to its forum. Some of the new features include:

• Ranking system
• Extended user profiles which will reflect your forum activity
• Better search results
• Add ranking to other users for their contribution

Posted by Dan at SEO for Blogging.
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