Ok, they may not all be sins (some are just pet peeves of mine) and they may not be deadly (although not doing some of these things will negatively impact your readership)…

My previous post made me think of the following Seven Deadly (Mostly Technical) Blogging Sins:

1. Not pinging blogrolling As I noted earlier, if you aren’t pinging blogrolling, you are missing out on readers. No ifs, ands or buts.

2. Not using blogrolling at all. What? You don’t have a blogroll? And I don’t just mean a list of links you call a blogroll. Surf over and get with the program.

3. Not liberally linking. Links are the currency of the Blogosphere. You show other bloggers respect and appreciation by linking to their work and by appropriately tipping the hat (or whatever you want to call it) when appropriate. When in doubt: link!

Many of the metrics in the Blogosphere use links (the TTLB, the Blogrolling Hot 500) and links equal readers. So link, link, link!

4. Not using trackbacks. Trackbacks facilitate communication and information flow between blogs. If at all possible, all blogs should use trackbacks.

What? You say that your software isn’t trackback enabled? Well, you can use Haloscan and the Wizbang Standalone Trackbacker.

Update: An example of the beauty of trackbacking, especially inline trackbacking, can be illustrated by OTB’s Beltway Traffic Jam.

5. Trackbacking without linking. This is just plain rude—if you want the courtesy of a link from another blog by trackbacking that blog, you should have the common courtesy to link to that person’s blog.

6. Not being listed in the TTLB. The Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem is the best existing means of tracking the relative significance of active blogs. Like Sitemeter (see below) it may not be perfect, but it is the best thing going. Plus, by being listed in the TTLB and by having the required codes on your blog you are helping blogs you link to with their overall rankings.

7. Having no public Sitemeter. To paraphrase Churchill: Sitemeter is the worst common metric of measuring blog traffic, except for all the others. Sitemeter is the only common method of measuring visits that exists—it is what the TTLB Ecotraffic rankings is based on and is the only counter that at least give s roughly comparable metric. It’s free and easy to install, so why don’t you have one?