Blogging is a great way to draw links. If you write interesting and unique content about your favourite subject and share it on social networks you're sure to draw some of them to specific posts. But this is usually a long, slow process.

Most bloggers take this approach. Unknown to the general public, they keep chipping away writing their thoughts on the subjects they love. So there's a lot of competition between them, particularly in popular niches. Even with backlinks accumulating fairly regularly it's hard for any one blogger to rise above the pack.

But there's one way to really get your blog firing in both social media and the search engines, and quickly. That's to blog about a particular subject that lots of people are interested in, and to be a primary source of information about it.

A perfect example of this is Michael Smith News. This is about something not only specific but topical: the AWU scandal involving Australia's PM Julia Gillard.

This blog was only commenced a few months ago but it has already attracted eye-boggling traffic numbers. One day recently, for example, it received 90000 hits. A basic backlink check reveals numerous links, particularly from other blogs.

Sure, the guy behind it was quite well known already, being a former broadcaster who lost his job with Fairfax as a result of his interest in the scandal. That high profile would have helped a lot ...

But the main reason so many people link to his blog is because it regularly includes previously unknown documents, as well as podcasts of interviews with protagonists such as self-confessed fraudster and bagman Ralph Blewitt. It is therefore primary source material. And Michael Smith is not just reporting on developments, but actually driving them as well. (For example it was his complaint to police that has prompted them to reopen the case, causing a lot of grief for the PM.)

Needless to say, very few bloggers would have the time, commitment or contacts to keep breaking news in the way Smith has been. But the success of his blog is something for all bloggers to keep in mind, no matter what field they're in.

I wrote earlier about how you should apply keyword selection principles to social media. I've often seen how this works. For example, if I tweet a lot about a a particular subject and those tweets contains certain keywords (often with hash tags, of course) I'll see a surge of new followers that have accounts closely related to them. It's pretty clear that they have been using Twitter as a search engine and have found me via those keywords. The correlation is too strong for anything else to be occurring.

And here's another little example: I've only recently started a Facebook Page for this site, SEO Tips Australia. I just gained a new fan. I looked at his likes and saw that he was liking lots of pages with the words "SEO" and "Australia" in the title. So he must have found mine by searches for those keywords. That's actually a very popular search on Google, so it makes sense that someone would be searching within Facebook for it also.

So, there's confirmation that it's worth using Google's free keyword tool to get some ideas about the best keywords to target on Facebook. Then you should put those in the name of your Page. And you should also be mindful of keywords when writing updates, because people do search for them in public posts. Sure, the FB search engine is pretty unsophisticated right now. But it's sure to improve over time. And people will use it more and more to find pages to connect with. So those SEO principles are definitely worth keeping in mind whenever you are using the site.

Because there are so many factors involved in search engine optimization, it's very hard to isolate which one in particular is due to a rise or fall in rankings. Still, you can make educated guesses from what you observe. Which is what I'm going to do now:

I have a blog about Perth that's been going a year or so. It spent quite a while about half way down the first page of Google for results for "Perth blog". Then it slowly dropped down the rankings and wound up on the bottom of the second page. It stayed there for a few months.

Now just recently I started uploading videos to YouTube. So far, they've all been of various Perth landmarks. And I've included a link to that particular blog with each video. I've also put its URL in the main profile section.

Now I know that all the links you get from YouTube these days are "nofollow". This means that search engines don't "follow" where they're pointing to and reward that particular site with higher rankings in the SERPs. That said, there does seem to be a belief among many in the SEO field that they might carry some small benefit ranking wise, particularly if the links are located on big quality sites.

This interpretation seems to have been confirmed by my own experience, because a couple of weeks after I put those links on YouTube my blog ended up on the top of the second page for searches for "Perth blog".

After this, in the last week or so, I established Google Plus authorship of that particular blog. This seems to have resulted in another boost for it. Now, I'm in the middle of the first page for searches for "Perth blog".

Maybe this won't last. I'll just have to wait and see. But I'm pretty sure that the Google Plus factor was what caused it, since it was a substantial change that occurred suddenly.

So in my opinion you should start putting videos on YouTube and link your Google Plus account to your blog as soon as possible.

There is a bit of a preconception that you should buy .au domains from Australian companies (not unlike with hosting). Of course that's got a lot to do with the fact that you can't actually purchase them from many of the big US based registrars. But one of the world's biggest, Go Daddy, certainly now offers them.

I just bought one there earlier today, actually. I've got several domains with them. So I like to keep everything in the one place. I've also found them really reliable, with prompt and thorough customer service. The price was low, too. I bought a .com.au domain for two years for around 23 bucks. That's not bad considering some local ones charge quite a bit more than that. (That said, Netregistry, which has a good reputation, does sell them for about the same price.)

I don't want to sound unpatriotic, but I have heard some bad reports about a couple of local domain registrars. Technical issues, mostly. So I figure it's better to go with a massive and proven international company.

One thing I've noticed repeatedly is that if one of my blog post gets a decent number of comments it seems to appear higher in the SERPs. As with so many things related to search engines, it's hard to be 100% sure this is the case. There are so many factors involved, after all.

But others have come to the same conclusion. So I'm pretty confident that having comments does benefit the blog post itself ranking-wise.

The fact that a post is more likely to be found means that it will probably generate still more comments. So the process continues ...

Apart from this SEO benefit, there's also the "social proof" aspect of comments. When people find your post and see that some readers have commented, it makes your blog immediately more appealing to them. It's "alive", so to speak.

Also, if you have one or two comments already, you're likely to get more. This phenomenon reminds me of what occurs in dance floors in nightclubs. The music starts and no one is game to get up and start dancing. But eventually one person (usually a woman!) plucks up the courage to do so. One or two others tentatively follow, then they all jump in at once.

So getting that first comment is crucial. That's why it's a good idea to invite comments, or finish your blog post with a question when appropriate. Another way to "get the ball rolling" is to write some really good comments on other blogs. The owners will often show their appreciation by writing comments on yours.

The Weebly blogging tool, which I'm using right now, is pretty good. But there's one downside that has been present pretty much the whole time I've been using it. And that is that it tends to take a while for posts to get indexed by Google. The blogs that I have on Blogger, on the other hand, get indexed pretty much immediately. (The conventional wisdom is that this is because the search giant owns that platform now.)

In any case, I've noticed a heartening trend lately. Ever since I've been sharing my Weebly blog posts on Google Plus they seem to end up in search results much quicker than before.

This might not be the actual cause, of course. Perhaps it's because I've been posting more frequently and have "trained" the search engine spiders to be quicker off the mark! Or perhaps this is a general phenomenon related to all Weebly blogs ...

Still, I think my hunch is correct. If it is then it's yet another good reason to join Google Plus and share blog posts, particularly if they are topical in nature and benefit from quick indexing.

I wrote earlier about how you can use Google's drop down suggestion box as a way to get good keyword ideas. You should really play around with this because it can supply you with limitless possibilities, particularly if you want to get geo-targeted traffic.

The key to unlocking its full potential is to do more than just typing in the keywords you want to target and seeing what follows afterwards. This is because your chosen keywords might be anywhere in a commonly used search engine query, even at the end.

Use it constantly and you'll see that there are many general verbal templates that appear over and over again. Take "the best (insert keyword) in (insert keyword)", for example. People also look for the cheapest, the worst, the biggest, etc. And that's just the start.

Think of just about any oft-used phrase, with or without a question mark, and start typing it in. You're sure to get numerous suggestions.

You'll often find ones related to your city or area. And even if you don't, there's still a good chance that people do make such queries from time to time -- just not as often as those that do appear as suggestions.

One thing I've noticed lately is how much traffic I'm getting from Bing and Yahoo these days. While I still get the lion's share from Google, the proportion of it coming from these two main competitors has risen substantially over the least year or so.

This is good news because it's not great to have all your eggs in one basket. Depending solely on traffic from this one source is not good for a website. You can do months of work to get it on the top of page one for a particular keyword search and then lose that position in an instant when Google decides to tweak its algorithms. This would be a hugely negative outcome for obvious reasons. But merely worrying that such a thing might occur can cause a lot of anxiety as well.

The fact that there are now more search engine possibilities is yet another reason why blogging is such a good thing to do. Google traffic is desirable, of course. So you should use its keyword tool and the drop down suggestion box to get ideas for blog posts. But if your post fails to rank highly there as hoped then there's still a good chance it will do so on Yahoo and Bing, which use different algorithms. That's a comforting thought and makes blogging all the more worthwhile.

For the same reason it's a good idea to get visitors from social media as well -- not to mention offline sources and pay per click. Spread your traffic sources around and you can make sure that the money you earn from your website is coming in more consistently.

Of course the appearance of a website is important. It's desirable to have one that looks appealing and unique. But I think that a lot of people confuse aesthetic appeal with quality. They assume that if a website is custom-made and looks fantastic then it will automatically get more traffic.

Sure, people may return to a website -- and even be more likely to buy from it -- because it looks beautiful. And visual attractiveness probably has some SEO benefit in the long run. If people are visually impressed by a website they're probably a bit more likely to link to it, after all.

Still, you've got to get them to look at it in the first place! And Google isn't ranking sites on their visual attractiveness. It has to judge by the actual content on the pages, which other sites link to it, social media activity, etc.

That's why I think that if you have a new site you shouldn't worry too much about making it look absolutely stunning. You should put most of your time and effort into writing the content, building some links to it and putting it in front of other webmasters and bloggers. A PPC campaign is a good idea too. Otherwise you'll feel very disheartened when you realize that your expensive visual masterpiece isn't getting any visitors at all. You can always get a top notch customization done when you've got some traffic happening.

A good illustration of the relative importance of content versus appearance comes from the Aussie blogosphere. One of the more popular local blogs is written by the mysterious Professor Bunyip. If you have a look you'll see it's just a basic Blogspot blog. It looks pretty awful, let's face it. But it gets a lot of views and comments. That's because he consistently comes up with unique and interesting content that's very well written, resulting in a lot of social media shares and voluntary one way backlinks. 

One question that seems to get asked quite a lot is what's the best length for a blog post? Ultimately there's no right or wrong answer. You should just put down your observations in the most clear and direct way possible. If it goes for ages, so be it. If it's just a 200 worder, that's fine too.

However, if your main aim is for it to get search engine traffic then the length is a factor. I have found that longer blog posts -- that is, over 500 words -- tend to rank higher in the SERPs.

Obviously, they can take a while to write. So this approach can make you feel like you're not really progressing. That's why, when you're just starting a blog, it's a good idea to write lots of short posts. When your blog is young and without any backlinks you've got little chance of getting any search traffic anyway. So you should just forget about trying to draw visitors this way for the time being, and focus on cranking out many information-rich entries.

You'll get a sense of achievement out of doing this, which is valuable. You'll also cover a lot of ground subject-wise. This can give you a good idea of the overall direction you should take. And the cumulative effect will help with SEO in the long run. Google will get to know what your blog is about a bit quicker than if you hadn't done this. It might help increase the speed at which it indexes the content, too.

This approach is a bit like a sculptor throwing down bits of clay to get the basic shape established. After that, he'll start being more careful and detailed in his approach and the true and complete character of the project will gradually take shape.