I like blogs. I enjoy them so much that I blog on numerous niches. As a blogger, there’s one thing that really warms the cockles of my heart: and that’s having my blogs blogged about by a bunch of other folks on the world wide web.

Out of the handful blogs I maintain, only two or three get that heartwarming buzz. The rest- well, they’re about as enervating as a cemetery on a workday. This led me to discover a few striking patterns that govern the ‘buzzability’ of a blog.

Do you want folks to write about your stuff? Then read on!

PDFs are crap. Are many of your pages amalgamations of PDF? Kick em off your server. The web is htm and php, remember that. Most visitors hate the lengthy loading times of PDF and the fact that you can’t copy and paste from them. I often close a window that turns out to be a bloated PDF loading at 10%…..

Dump the Copy protection scripts. I once was guilty of placing scripts that disabled the right mouse button’s “Save as” command. The script also prevented selecting swathes of text and pasting them onto other locations (like Notepad). The practice got me a lot of angry surfers who’d IM “Hey! You’re offering free downloads but I can’t even save them!” Oops. Such scripts are so 90s and prevent people from even bothering to comment on the sublime stuff you carry!

Flash Sites reek. Fine. They look snazzy, as though a 150 IQ designer spent a year on them. But did you know a soulless Flash site bears no inherent linking structure, no copyable text that can be quoted, and no means of identifying specific pages? Running flash to generate content is like erecting a 30ft wall around your beautiful house. No one can get at it. Oh- and search engines can’t index flash either. You’ll end up invisible.

Keep Structure Consistent. Last year, I found an interesting article on weightloss resulting from ingestion of virgin coconut oil. I linked to it from a related fitness article on my site. My anchor text went: “Try this cheap supplementation method to shave off pounds in no time- it worked for me!”

Two months later, I found my link pointing to a page on cheap arsenic and formaldehyde. Shockers! The webmaster changed the permalinks and so I ended up pointing to pages that really would have exacted weightloss- and hospitalization.

Varying site structure can turn off folks who expect consistency.

Impregnate all your Photos and MP3s.  Does your site have amazing images of UFOs torching your neighbor’s cat? You better hurry and put your url on all these images. This ensures that when some shady warez site carries your image without credit, bloggers will still know which site to visit (yours). Do the same for all web documents that tend to be snagged like Mp3s (impregnate their ID3), PDFs and docs.

Are you ready to get buzzed?