Blogger Getting Better

Which blog format is better, Blogger or Wordpress? That's the age old argument online and here in Salem. My blogs eatsalem.com and salemites.com are both Blogger blogs. I have had on several occasions people try to convince me that Wordpress is better. Their reasoning is that Wordpress is friendlier to search engines. I've also heard that people like the stats and believe that Wordpress has a more elegant or professional work look.

Here's my argument for Blogger. Blogger is cheap. $10 a year for the domain name and the blog is hosted for free on Blogger which is owned by Google. To host a Wordpress on godaddy.com is around $55 a year. Yes I'm cheap/frugal, but this low cost allows for the ability to experiment with different ideas with less risk. Not all blogs will catch on, so it's no sweat to dump one that's not attracting an audience.

I'll confess to not understanding the way Wordpress is better for search engines. I think it has something to do with how the keywords are picked up by the search engine bots that constantly crawl through the site. My answer to that is this link to a page that explains how to make Blogger more SEO. This change in how search engines display the blog makes it more inviting to readers. It will take some time for this change to take effect in search results, but it will work. If you have a Blogger blog you should do this step asap. It's not as hard as it seems. Whenever you decide to change your template you need to make this change.

Addressing the stats issue, I have always had great stats using statcounter.com. Reading stats is important for growing a blog. Think of it as watching a plant grow. When more people are reading it, the healthier the blog is becoming. A closer look at how traffic passes through the site will tell you what it is that you are doing right or wrong. Statcounter is free, so is Google Analytics. Both are easy to install into an HTML gadget on the site. Even easier is the new stats feature on the Blogger dashboard. This recently created function shows what pages people are clicking on and where the traffic sources came from.

Finally, for those hung up on the look of Blogger, problem solved. Blogger allows for customization of the template to make it look like anything you want. There are tons of free templates available online. Here's a link to a site that has some good ones. If you want to make your blogger look like Wordpress, you can do that too. Here's some examples; here and here and here. Changing the template is not too difficult, but if you are not comfortable with your blogging skills, there is another option for improving the look of your site. The new "Template Designer" feature on Blogger can greatly improve any basic template. This site, in fact, was created using the Template Designer. Give it a test drive.

I'm sure that this information will not reduce the calls for me to switch to Wordpress. People are loyal to the way they learned to blog and switching between the two can be difficult. I even entertained the idea briefly. For someone learning to blog from the start, I think it is best to have the fewest obstacles in the way of creating content. The meat of a blog is in the posts. Blogger is much more intuitive then Wordpress, allowing for greater ease in expressing words and thoughts. When a writer gets better and learns a bit of HTML, Blogger is more flexible at putting things on the site.

In the big picture, the difference between the two formats is unnoticeable to the average reader. The nuances that most bloggers see is not visible to the casual observer looking for a fun read. I really don't care what format a new blogger picks. If you are writing about Salem, be sure to send me a link to your site and we will link it onto Salemites.com. Happy blogging.