It’s day three of Blog tip’s Blog Boot Camp. Have you read Day one and Day two ? It’s all about taking control of your blog’s content.

For many, creating a blog starts with us sharing our knowledge or passions (the subject matter type not the bedroom passion type- although I am sure there are blogs about that topic out there as well!)

We aren’t always thinking about planning our content and layout when we start blogging which results in a cluttered blog that makes it hard for your visitors to focus on your content and sponsor advertisements.

So far we have covered Blog awards and Blog top sites, today we tackle your Blog Roll. Before you decide how to display your blog roll on your blog, you need to determine WHY you blog roll.

For some, it really is simply a list of their favourite blogs, for some it’s about reciprocal links with very niche blogs such as theirs, or maybe you use your blog roll to list some affiliate links.  The term blog roll means;

“A list of other blogs that a blogger might recommend by providing links to them (usually in a sidebar list).” Wikipedia

However as a tool, your blog roll features can be used for a variety of purposes. So you need to decide WHAT you will use your blog roll for and look at what limitations you may have for displaying your blog roll.

I am a firm advocate for having your own hosted WordPress Blog. With WordPress you can find blog roll plugins that will allow you to post your blog roll in a page, by category, random lists, rotating lists and more. My favourite Blog Roll plugin is Advanced Blog Roll.

My suggestions (if possible on your blog platform) are:

• Customize your Blog roll title in your side bar to increase your keyword content (i.e. change from Blog roll to  ‘favorite coupon blogs’ if coupon blog is one of your keywords.)
• Limit your sidebar blog roll to list no more then 10 links.
• Create a Link page to display your full blogroll list on your Favourite blogs page. Yes, there are plugins for this  such as this one .
• Of course if you REALLY want to give your favourite blogs SEO love, direct links are better then using an automated system. So you could forget the page, rotate up to 10 on your main page and blog about your favourites instead of using a blogroll page.
• I encourage using a follow tag and exchanging links. If you need the links back for SEO, trading with bloggers who have a default no follow on their blog roll won’t help you or them. If you are limiting your outgoing links, having these set to follow should not be a problem.

Customizing and cleaning up your Blog’s blog roll is definitely specific to each bloggers purpose for blog rolling. They keys are to; categorize, keep it small on your template pages (sidebars), and keep it up to date (remove broken links).

Cleaning up your blog roll might take a few minutes or hours depending on the number of links you have. But the organized result is worth it for your visitors and advertisers.

Until Tomorrow,

Don’t forget to check out our contest – win a custom header, banners, and twitter background for your blog.