Running a website has not been without its challenges–the largest one being our embarrassing lack of computer skills. When we started up in 2007, our webmaster had to hold our hands through everything from pasting in our posts to loading up a picture. Have we become expert bloggers in the last year and a half? Well . . . we’re trying. To our credit, we have boosted our traffic considerably since those early days.

Here are our top five tips:

1. Title your posts with as many key words as possible. Webcrawlers scan your site for key words, which to them means titles and bolded phrases. In an early post about natural teething remedies, Joy thought up the clever title “Gnawing Worries.” My cousin told us to change it. No one who is hunting around for natural teething ideas is typing “gnawing worries” into Google. Joy changed the title to “Natural Teething Solutions to Soothe Gnawing Worries.”

2. Think of keywords when titling photos, too. Many people stumble upon your site through images. So instead of titling your picture “Mikey,” title it “smiling baby in a plastic bathtub from Target with a blue washcloth.”

3. Tag your posts with every keyword you can think of. My cousin (our webmaster) told us over and over to tag our posts. For the longest time, we thought she was talking about creating links to other sites! Once we figured it out, we vowed to add more tags. Sometimes we can think of up to fifty keywords or phrases to use for a single post.

4. Join or host a blog carnival. We get consistent traffic by participating in Works for Me Wednesday, hosted by We are THAT Family. It’s a great way to network with other bloggers, too. You could also try hosting your own blog carnival. Thrifty Green Thursday (on hiatus until fall) linked us to some like-minded bloggers and boosted our traffic, even though we often had no more than four participants at a time!

5. Network with other websites. Seek out websites with similar themes and add them to your blogroll. We resisted starting a blogroll for a few months; we wanted to look like an official site rather than a “blog.” However, we soon learned it was imperative to get known in the blogging community! If you link to other sites, they’ll link to yours, too.

If you are one of our fellow bloggers, we want to hear your thoughts, too. What are your blogging secrets? Keep them as elementary or as complicated as you want. We’ve stuck to the basics because of our admittedly limited computer know-how. Now that we’ve been at this a while, perhaps it’s time for us to graduate to the intermediate class.

These blogging tips worked for us! For more Works for Me Wednesday ideas, head on over to We are THAT Family.