Some things a new blogger needs to know

If you are new to blogging, or even it you have been at it for sometime, there are 2 major things you should know. If you re using Google's Blogger, you should be aware that, that format uses the "nofollow" attribute for comments. That means if you put a comment in a comment box with your URL linked to the comment, the search engines will follow the link but not give you any "link juice" for it. In other words it will not count as a backlink to your blog. Wordpress based blogs, on the other hand will. Some owners of blogger based blogs are aware of this and have removed the "nofollow" attribute. I have removed that attribute so all the comments are a "do follow" on this blog. Before you go crazy and start commenting like mad, I must warn you that comments are still moderated.

Next you should know how to send a message to the search engines whenever you update your blog. The term "pinging" is used to describe that action. For Wordpress blogs, there is a section to add the ping services in your dashboard so that "pinging" is automatically done each time you publish a post. Blogger based blogs have a simple one ping service that may or may not work that well. Each time you publish a new blog post you need to let the search engines know about it. I use pingomatic.com a simple online submission tool that will send a ping to all the major search engines.

Just being aware of those 2 things will help you out in your blogging adventure.