How interactive is your blog?

Over a decade ago, when blogging began, the most wonderful thing about blogs was that they were interactive.

Before then websites were basically online brochures (and many still are!) that were mainly static, occasionally looked good and provided information. Then technology moved on to enable people to write comments online.

Now you can have your say

Blogs allowed their visitors to add in their own input and immediately publish it! But then spam reared its ugly head to spoil things, so systems were created to keep this problem in check and bloggers had to moderate the comments they received.

Then social networking happened. These interactive forums were where lots of people could have their say in one place, so blogs had to adapt to become more interactive.

RSS (really simple syndication) enabled subscribers to receive post updates via email or on a special reader, or submit newly published posts’ links into the social media platforms, increasing the chance for more people to visit and read these blogs.

Blogs began to get noticed

Search engines like Google noticed blogs more than websites because they were a regular and much better source for new content. They used spiders (algorithmic robots that ‘crawled’ the web) to search and bring online material back to the search engines for indexing (positioning on their ‘pages’).

People soon realised that certain words reacted more favourably with the spiders, creating SEO (search engine optimisation) which greatly influenced web content (including blogging).

Eventually this was abused which made the search engines unusable, so Google changed it’s algorithms at the beginning of 2013 to favour the writer over digital marketing tactics.

Things changed for the better

Now excellently written content became more valuable than multiple keyword usage, and links had to be highly relevant and authoritative rather than merely collectable items.

Interaction, that wonderful phenomenon that wowed everybody a decade ago, was now appropriately respected, raising comments to a higher status on blogs and in social networking and bookmarking, with altruistic sharing of content being held in higher regard by the search engines.

Being interactive is the result of commenting and sharing. Comments on your blog are seen by spiders as new indexible content, RSS exposes what you say to a larger audience and retweeting similarly acts as a recommendation device.

Commenting is also a form of networking. Contributing to other blogs encourages authors to visit and read your blog, who will then hopefully promote or share your posts amongst their friends and contacts.

So what about you?

So after this long post (which I didn’t mean it to be!) I’m asking these questions:

• How interactive is your blog and how interactive are you outside of it?
• What interaction systems do you already have in place?
• What success do you have about encouraging interaction?

All this is excellent fodder for some great comments, so let’s get cracking…

About Alice Elliott

Alice Elliott, aka Fairy Blog Mother, is an award winning blogging consultant who has been looking after bloggers since 2006! Woah, that's a long time! She specialises in "explaining things really simply" about WordPress, and has twice been noted as a top WordPress influencer for 2019.

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