Week 6 Reaction Blog

In this week's blog on social media, Ginny Mineo explains the "Anatomy of an Optimized Blog Post." In other words, what are the elements of a successful, creative, innovate blog? In his article, Mineo lists 12 ideas on how to best optimize a blog post.

Certainly the best blogs contain captivating writing, interesting topics, and often a light-hearted, relatively informal language. However, if a blog can't easily be found by simply searching for it, very few will have the opportunity to read it. Regardless of how good a writer might be, their efforts will do no good if they are not optimizing their blog to reach a large audience.

Several of Mineo's 12 ideas cover how to reach the largest audience possible. Search engines are perhaps the biggest way to attract a lot of traffic to a blog. Mineo points out that keywords located within the blog's URL are key to getting a blog to the top of the search list. He adds that keywords and topics that people are interested in will increase the popularity of the blog.

Another way to increase a popularity of a blog is through other social media. Ginny Mineo says that share buttons should be "prominently displayed." A single reader may have hundreds of followers and friends on social media. If that reader hits the share button, suddenly hundreds of people that may not have otherwise seen the blog now learn about it through social media.

Once a blogger gains an audience, the goal becomes to keep that audience. Mineo describes various ideas such as shorter paragraphs, relatively informal, conversational language, and appealing headlines as great ways to keep the audience interested in the blog. Readers will want their voice to be heard, and offering a comments section is a great way to do that! Starting conversation among consumers will increase the overall popularity and interest in the blog.