Isaac Atia is the founder of www.howitoo.com which focuses on SEO tips, blogging advice, and everything else around it. To read more of Isaac’s blog posts, subscribe to his RSS Feed or simply visit his blog.

It’s OK to be honest with yourself – you probably don’t love your blog as much you could, but you can change that. With today’s mounting competition in the blogosphere, many beginner and advanced bloggers alike feel pressured to improve the overall vibe, appearance, or style of their blog. In this post, I’ll outline the 11 most vital tips to successful blogging and building an overall better blog.

What guidelines may define a better blog? 

1. Write quality content – While it’s easy to write content that’s just average, writing quality content is much more powerful in a number of ways. By writing sincere and respectful content, you are establishing your credibility while making a connection with your visitors. What’s more, by writing valuable content you may gain faithful readers along the way and future visits through referrals and/or the search engines.

2. Craft keyword rich titles – A powerful tactic to increase your blog’s traffic is to base your post on one solid keyword and possibly two other related keywords. If a search engine user is seeking information about a specific topic, the user’s search term could be identical to your post title and therefore convert to a visitor. Needless to say, the more closely related your title is to the search term, the better placement and rank your page will gain.

3. Remain clear on your objective – What type of message are you trying to get across? Different writers choose one or the other; educate, entertain, or inform. What’s your style of writing? Have a clear technique in mind and flow with it. It’s important to be able to envision your readers’ thoughts and write in light of their benefit. As a side note, you should engage your commenters to help you stay on topic.

4. Write often – There are always good reasons to write more. Writing fresh content will grow your database, attract new readers, and surely enough build new relationships. However, a level of quality should be maintained when publishing a post; more is not better under any circumstances.

5. Become creative – How many times did you stop at a blog and read the same information, just in a different format? In order to have an edge, you must keep coming up with innovative content that’ll inspire your readers and distinguish you from the average blogger.

6. Stay proactive – Don’t wait for visitors to come to you, put in work and reach out for them. Promotion of your blog is half the battle. Writing guest posts on popular blogs (such as this one) is probably the best way to get a decent amount of traffic to your website. Build your fan base or network at social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter. Staying connected with a relatively large group of people with similar interests will definitely pay off in the long run; perhaps when you decide to promote your newly launched product or service.

7. Keep weapons in your arsenal – Write a few solid posts and keep them for a rainy day. There may come a time when you hit serious writer’s block and just can’t come up with any decent ideas. I have at least 2 to 3 unpublished posts at all times in the event such adversity takes place Also, on my spare time or when it pops into my mind, I jot down new ideas or topics that I’d like to blog about.

8. Maintain organization – Does your article have a solid introduction, body, and conclusion? Highlight your main points by either creating a bulleted list or defining them with a bold sub-title. A list of bullets is highly recommended because it helps your reader to sort through and understand the information more easily.

9. Change it up – While writing articles and adding to your content is great, some of your visitors may prefer different media avenues. Try to mix it up by recording a podcast, using alluring pictures, or even consider making a what Darren calls a ‘talking head video’ for the more viral user.

10. Keep track of your traffic – Powerful tracking services like Google Analytics, Site Meter, Clicky, or Chartbeat, can tremendously help you in improving your traffic. By following your most popular posts, you’ll be able to know what topics your readers are most interested in. This will help you analyze other miscellaneous details such as demographics and the source of traffic.

11. Review before publishing – Blog readers simply don’t like to come across typos and grammar mistakes. Take just a few minutes to read over your new post before you hit the publish button. Ask yourself questions like: Is my content easy to read? Is it interesting to the average reader? Did I remain clear on my topic? Did I keep the search engines in mind? And finally, did I inspire the reader enough to interact by commenting?

Did I miss anything important? There are several blog promotion tips you can use to build a better blog but I believe I covered the most vital ones. Bear in mind that building a better, more powerful and established blog will take much time and effort on your end. Tell me what you think!