A friend who has recently started blogging asked me how she could improve the performance of her blog.

Even though we’re not huge, I like to think that this SiteMost SEO Blog is reasonably successful (well at least by my performance indicators it is). Each month we continuing to attract new subscribers (sure it’s slow, but people continue to signup), traffic to the site is good, our readers are starting to add the odd comment or two and our posts occasionally end-up on social media sites such as Sphinn, StumbleUpon and one even made it onto Digg.

So how does one achieve this success?

Before you can measure the ’success’ of something, you need to first identify what you define as ’successful’. What is important to you, what are your goals, what milestones do you have etc. etc. Here’s some stuff that might help:

• Blog Metrics - Six recommendations for measuring your success
• Blog analytics tools
• The 7 most important metrics for Bloggers
• Using stats and goal tracking for your blog

Once you work-out what’s important to you (and your blog) and more importantly, how you’ll measure these goals over time - the next step is to make sure your blog is Search Engine ready.

Fortunately blogging platforms such as WordPress are designed with a good initial search architecture, but if you’d like to take things a little further, Aaron Wall’s Bloggers Guide to SEO is a great start if you’re new to the Search Optimisation game.

There are also plenty of plugins and widgets that you can add to your blog to improve your SEO performance. One of the best is the All in One SEO Pack and for others, I’d suggest having a look at: Graywolf’s post about SEO Plugins for Wordpress and sign-up for Joost’s SEO Plugin’s Mailing List for ongoing updates on the latest and greatest plugins to try.

So now you have a SEO ready blog, your goals are clearly defined and you’ll know how to track the performance… the next step is making sure you have content that will be appealing to the broader community.

Fortunately Copyblogger has already compiled a brilliant list about creating content that attracts links and drives traffic in the social media environment.

Also on the topic of blog promotion, Problogger explains how he’d promote his blog if he were starting again. Darren has also recently compiled a list of great guest-posts from other bloggers on each of their blogging tipping-points as well as sharing his own.

So there’s a bunch of resources on what others have done. But what have we done?

Well, we’ve applied most of the above techniques, but here are a specific list of things that have been most successful for SiteMost:

• Back in December 2007 our blog was featured in a review by Problogger. This caused a spike in our subscriber numbers (many of which have remained loyal readers).
• After having a number of our articles appear in the Daily SearchCap, we made it onto the blogroll of Search Engine Land.
• Guest posting, submitting articles and being actively involved in communities such as SEOmoz and Sphinn also gained some exposure and created some great contacts.
• Interacting with other SEOs through social media sites like StumbleUpon and using tools like Twitter has also been an integral part of our growth. On the topic of Twitter, here’s 35 Twitter tips from other Twitter users.
• Meeting local blogger in offline social environments has also been really enjoyable and has helped reinforce our authority in the local community. This is something that many bloggers overlook. Just because blogging is an online activity doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try and take the social aspects offline and interact with other like-minded people face-to-face.

I find that I read a lot, but when things are busy and I don’t have much time, I tend to move onto the next post and don’t add any feedback. So my next challenge is to start to comment a lot more on other blogs and start to interact a lot more with the global community.

The important thing to remember is that when you start a blog, it isn’t about getting thousands of new readers and so much traffic that your host panics everytime you publish a new post. If you start with 5 regular readers which increases to 10 the following month - you’ve just doubled your traffic!

Take it slow, clearly define your goals, measure the things you do to see what works and what doesn’t (every blog is different and what works for one, may not work for another) but most importantly - have fun. I remember looking through one of my Mum’s old cookbooks and at the end of each recipe, the final step would always be ‘Enjoy’.

There’s no point cooking if you aren’t going to enjoy the food and there’s no point blogging if you aren’t going to enjoy connecting with others through the power of text.

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