We will review blogs by checking the list of common features and emphasizing the features that are unique to a given blog software.

Blog Features for Review:

- Categorization

This feature is one of the common features of every blogging software. It allows grouping of posts related by a subject into sections that are easy to navigate through. Although it provides convenience for blog visitors to concentrate on a single topic of their interest by skipping articles they may not be interested in reading, it may also have a negative effect for the SEO. If you have just a few categories, at some point - if your recent posts belong to one single category, it may seem as a duplicate content and confuse robots. These days the major search engines are applying special algorithms to recognize your site’s structure and index your content accordingly. However, it is recommended that links to the category pages contain rel=”nofollow” directive, at least until you create a decent number of categories and publish enough content in each of them to make sure that they do not look like duplicates of your blog’s homepage.

- Archives

Just as subject grouping or categories, archives may add a slight convenience to navigating your blog. It may also be a good way of showing off the age of your publications, therefore expertise and authoritative image overall. However, just as in the case of categories – archives may pose danger from the SEO perspective, since archive for the current month may look exactly like your homepage or even some category. It is also recommended, if you must provide links to your archives, to make sure that they are robot-exclusive.

- Comments

Post/page comments is a neat feature that entice your visitors to participate in discussions of the information provided on the pages of your publication. It also provides a good way of creating valuable and unique content that will be indexed by robots, as well. Enabling comments for your posts/pages is a matter of personal preference and the purpose of your site. Generally it has no negative effect on the SEO side of the story.

- Static Pages

Static pages are a great way of publishing time-insensitive information. Just as this page that you are reading right now, static pages should usually contain information that is important or stays true at any given point of time and perhaps has a low chance of changing (ever). These pages will not be included into the post loop and will have to be added automatically or manually into the navigational menu or referenced from some other posts or pages. Otherwise they will not be discovered by crawlers and will not do you any good, unless the whole idea of creating the page would be to keep it hidden. Static pages can also have, so called, child pages that create virtual relationship among a group of pages. The use of such relations is a goal-driven decision and should be discussed separately.

- Skins/Templates

Pluggable templates (skins) are a great way of changing your site’s look in mere moments. Most of them will have similar structure. Therefore re-skinning your blog should not disturb peaceful crawlers, unless you had previously modified your template and the new template greatly differs in structure. One great recommendation for those who like tweaking templates: make notes when you change scripts, especially if these changes are not just visual but structural. If you ever decide to completely change the look by popping in a new template, you will be able to recreate changes to your new one before publishing it to the web.

- Permalinks

Permalinks or “pretty URL” is the feature that allows you to use comprehensive posts names instead of meaningless post ids. They are easy to remember and spell for humans. They also may contain additional hints in a form of keywords for the SE that will send crawlers to your blog pages. Permalinks are easy to setup, so use’em whenever possible.

- Plugin Framework

Plugins – extending your capabilities! Plugin framework is a set of API rules that allows developers to create additional modules for blogs. You have probably seen web forms, voting polls, etc. incorporated into blog pages. There is a great chance that they were visual manifestations of plugins. However, do not think of plugins as just something you will be able to see with a naked eye in your pages. Plugins can also provide preprocessing and utility functions that are noticeable by checking the code or not even that. Example of such plugins can be Meta insertion, spam catchers, stat trackers, etc. Without getting into great details of this great feature – extendibility, having a convenient way of improving your blog is always a good thing. When you pick your blogging solution make sure that there is a way to use plugins and that there are great libraries of existing plugins to use.

- Update Services

“Update Services are tools you can use to let other people know you’ve updated your blog” – the definition by WordPress.org. This is a great help when you want your content to be noticed by search engines and communities equipped for receiving your pings. (WordPress users, refer to Update Services at WordPress.org)

- Feeds

Preformatted and standardized list of recent posts available to the visitors that would like to read blog’s content via a special client program (feed reader). People my use feeds to subscribe for the updates at your blog. Having feeds will assure that your followers will stay up-to-date with your posts even if they can’t visit your site regularly.

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