How to Create a Blog and Get Search Results
From my last post I got a few questions about how or where to create a blog. Lately I've been thinking about how I can encourage more and more to blog since I've been seeing the benefits from those who blog and suffering as a result of those who fail to share. We speak of all the duplication we all do as a result of not being able to get search results. There's simply a ton of content behind the firewall that with special consideration and a bit of effort could benefit everyone. Be sure to find out what your corporate policy if there is one on blogging, but if you're reading this, you've likely read a few blogs and hence have benefited from bloggers. So comes the clarion call... Join the SharePoint Blogging Revolution!
In no ranked order each having different disk and image file size restrictions. As far as the rich sense of community goes, I do recommend Dustin's SharePoint blogger community. If you setup your blog there and your posts are decent, you are guaranteed to get visibility based on the work they've already done to expose the best content.
SharePoint Bloggers (www.sharepointblogs.com)
In my searching I did find a free, no credit card required, no time limit, WSS hoster FrontPages Web Hosting (5 MB limit): http://www.fpweb.net/free-sharepoint/ Be sure to choose anonymous and the blog template.
There are a number of other free WSS 3.0 Trials, but do have time limits.
The rest of these are based on a variety of non sharepoint technology based platforms and have a variety of different pros and cons. I've had friends use nearly all of them. In my opinion the key things to consider in a blog are 1) disk space, 2) flexibility 3) control over your own adds and look and feel 4) ping backs and track backs 5) rich editing control and ability to post from word or other editing tools.
If you are internal to Microsoft you should seriously consider using http://blogs.msdn.com or http://blogs.technet.com, there are more blogs on MSDN and appears to have a stronger following currently. There's also a community that Lawrence Liu has put together to promote blogs on SharePoint technologies at http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs
How do you submit your new blog to search engines?
Let me give you the top 3 which account for the great majority of searches anyway... You may want to substitute the .com with the relevant country prefix for global or lingual aspects.
Beyond these, I know there are a number of free tools on the web that submit to a bunch of engines at once. You can do this yourself or pay someone to do it for you, such as buying keywords, ads or paying for ranking.
