Blog awards

[FlamingoBingo]

As a way of increasing readership of my blog, I'm coming to think that it would be very helpful if I won, or was at least nominated for, a good blog award.

Does anyone have any tips or experience in this matter that they could share? I thought this could be a useful conversation for all of us.

I was a judge in the first MAD Awards, so I have a bit of exerience of all this. There seem to be loads of blogging awards now, like the Gurgles and I think BritMums have some too. There are also some schemes which are presented as if they are awards, but they're really just a sneaky way to get you to put a badge on your blog linking to the sponsor's site. For some awards you can nominate yourself, then you need to ask/hassle people to vote for you.

The down side is that awards can also be incredibly divisive within the blogging world - one would hope that people would be pleased for you if you do well, but alas many prefer to seethe with jealousy.

Hmm...so what would you say is the best way to get more hits on your blog? Apart from writing good content and being patient

Writing good content is of course the major thing. I think it's important to know enough about SEO to optimise your posts if you want to - sometimes I will post something throwaway just to amuse myself, and not bother about SEO, but if it was something like a review then I am very careful to write it in such a way that it stands a chance of being found by search engines.

Competitions will bring in lots of hits, and hopefully those people will go on to become regular readers.

Most of my non search engine hits come from Twitter and Facebook. For Twitter, it's a good idea to link to your posts more than once, but spread it out widely across the day so people in different timezones see it.

I do that on Twitter, and have a growing FB page...and do SEO - I think I'm doing all the right things.

It's not the right sort of blog for comps at all I don't think, although thinking of doing parenting book reviews in the future so may be able to do comps for the books.

Just got to be patient I think!

One more thing you could do is optimise your images for SEO, ie save them under a new title including keywords. It's amazing how many people search for things under Google images, and particularly if you take your own pics, this will really help your blog stand out on search engines.

Are mumsnet planning any awards?

Great - thanks for that tip, Joanne :)