This morning, and I mean really early morning, I went about my weekly perusal of about 50 or so SEO and SEM blogs.

For the most part this is a very informative and satisfying experience. However, there are a few barriers to blog reader experience that I feel especially obligated to point out. These observations are relevant for any business blog:

* Don’t make readers register or login to make a comment. What, you’re too lazy to manage all the comment spam? Or install a better spam filter? You’re lucky to get people to your blog in the first place. Why make it inconvenient to interact?

* Please don’t publish content in PDF of MS Word format that would be just as fine as a web page. I hear you saying, what? Yes, there are a few blogs out there that post using a blog content management system, but publish longer articles, white papers, etc in other formats. At least warn readers before they click on the link.

* Why oh why must so many blogs make it difficult to subscribe? Get an RSS button up above the fold. Add your RSS url to an auto discovery tag in the head template. If you really want to capture extra readers, add an RSS to email option like the one offered at Feedblitz.

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Blogs are an evolution, and keeping it up is a big commitment.

Usually you end up focusing on just creating new content on some sort of consistent interval, but the biggest problem with keeping a blog up to date is revising all those elements you once thought you would use, but now realize are not useful at all. This is my 400th blog post on this blog, and I recently rebranded the blog slightly to make the name simpler. Now I am thinking about to carry through the theme of simplicity to improve the user experience on the blog even further. Here’s my list of ways that I plan to rethink the interface of my blog or have elements I have already replaced:

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Is it possible to steal customers looking for your competition in Google Maps? It not only appears as if you can, but it might be trivially easy and somewhat troubling that it’s possible.

It’s also a good reason why it’s important to register your business with Google Maps and other local search services and have at the very least a single page website listing your company info.

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