If MacGyver has taught us anything, it’s that you don’t need big expensive tools to get the job done. The same goes for blogging.

There are plenty of free blogging tools and resources to do everything from creating SEO friendly sites to keyword research and analytics. Why spend the money on a tool when you could use that money on internet marketing services or to grow your company?

Here are 13 free blogging tools and resources that MacGyver would be proud of.

WordPress

MacGyver would surly use the most popular, customizable, powerful, and completely free, blogging software on the internet. WordPress offers a large number of feature and hundreds of plugins that will make any blog successful. From newbies to web design professionals, WordPress is a great choice for ease of use, search engine optimization and price.

Google Analytics

MacGyver’s got to keep tabs on his site and know where his traffic is coming from.  For this, Google Analytics is a no brainer. No need to spend hundreds on an analytics package, Google Analytics as all the features you need at a price that can’t be beat.

Guest posters are a good idea for all blogs. Different people have different ideas, different writing styles, and different ways to connect to visitors.

Not only is it a good idea for your readers, it’s a good idea for your blog.

The more authors a blog has, the more content that will get generated, the more active the blog will appear and, when that happens, search engines can give more rankings and traffic. All of this leading to more sales, revenue, or whatever the blogs KPI is.

More bloggers help out a blog in more ways than one and growing a blog with multiple authors, or guest posters, is a win-win situation.

And with that, BloggerDesign is happy to have Michelle Bowles, a copywriter at TopRank Marketing, publishing her first post here tomorrow! Check back to see what tips she has for bloggers.

As blogs grow, and new content gets created, old blog posts can quickly get lost in the archives. As much as bloggers try to keep everything organized, it’s hard to ensure that all posts get the exposure they deserve. However, there are ways to help ensure that older posts get additional exposure.

1. Related Posts

On individual post pages, add links to other related posts. This shows visitors that there is more content on your blog that might be of interest to the reader. I’d suggest showing 5 posts as it gives a little variety without giving to many options.

Tip: Try out the Yet Another Related Posts Plug-in to integrate related posts into a WordPress blog.

2. Top or Popular Posts

In the sidebar, create a section for the blogs most popular posts. Again, pulling in 5 posts from the entire history of the blog and showcase what users feel are the best posts on your blog.

Tip: Read How To Find Your Most Popular Posts for plug-ins and ideas for obtaining posts.

It seems that that there could be a lot more done with WordPress’ internal search. More results, better options, filters, or something to make the user experience better. So I started looking for options.

One option I found was Lijit. Lijit offers the ability to allow your users to search your blog, bookmarks, photos, videos, social networks such as Twitter, and other sites from one search box on your site. It seemed like what I was looking for, so I installed it.

The downside to Lijit is that it can give other sites more visibility via advertising or the web searches tab. And taking traffic off your site isn’t always a good idea. The upsides though are that you can include many blogs, social networks and all sorts of different things into your search results. Lijit makes it all about your network of sites, not just about one blog.

So far I’m not overly impressed with Lijit as I don’t see any Twitter results and I see sites like TechCruch which I don’t have listed in my settings. I’m hoping the bugs get worked out in the next day or two.

A while back we covered a plug-in called Subscribe To Comments.  It’s a great way to ensure that when visitors comment on your blog posts, they receive follow-up comments and stay a part of the conversation.

After using Subscribe To Comments for over a year, there was one major issue, fake email addresses.  Whether they are from people who didn’t want to leave their real email address, or from spammers, the number of bounce backs can become overwhelming.

The good news is there are developers out there that have taken the Subscribe To Comments plug-in to the next level.  They require a user to validate their email address before subscribing to the comments.  This ensures that they wanted to subscribe and that their email address is valid.

The two plug-ins that I’ve seen are Gurken Subscribe to Comments and Subscribe to Double-Opt-In Comments.  I’ve started to use Gurken Subscribe to Comments and like the added functionality.

One thing that I did notice however is that you need to make sure to customize the subscription confirmation emails that go out.  The default one went into Gmail’s spam folder, as it was very light on content.  Take the time and write out a nice email to help keep it out of peoples spam boxes and inform the user as to why they are getting the verification email.

The grass is growing, the flowers are blooming and that means it’s spring! As people start the spring cleaning on their garages, it’s also a great time to do some spring cleaning on your blog and give it a tune-up.

A lot of things can happen to a blog over time and blog maintenance is a task that probably doesn’t get done as often as it should. When is the last time you tested your comments? Or filled out your own forms? Maybe looked at the site in Internet Explorer?!

It’s a good idea to take a step back and look at your site, as others do, from time to time to ensure everything is working, and displaying, as it should.

Here are a few things to help with your blog tune up and spring cleaning.

1. Upgrade your software.  If you aren’t running the latest version of your blog software, you may be missing out on features, security patches or bug fixes.  Upgrading could make for an improvement in performance for both blog authors and visitors.
2. Upgrade your plug-ins.  Just like with blog software, the plug-ins you run get updated from time to time to fix, update and improve.  Check those plug-ins to see if anything needs to be updated.

We’ve talked about the benefits of owning your own blog, but what if you’ve already got a blog someplace else and want to move it to your own, hosted, WordPress blog?  You can do that.

WordPress offers a number of easy import options for most major free or paid blogging platforms out there.  This makes it easy to move away from other software to your own, hosted, WordPress blog.

WordPress currently offers the ability to import:

• Blogger
• Blogware
• DotClear
• GreyMatter
• LiveJournal
• Movable Type
• TypePad
• Textpattern
• WordPress
• OPML Files
• RSS Feeds

Each one of these options can be access by logging into your hosted WordPress blog and visiting the Tools -> Import section.  From there, WordPress will give specific step-by-step instructions on what to do.

Additional blogging platforms can also be imported, but are not officially supported. This includes:

• b2
• b2evolution
• Blosxom
• Drupal
• e107 CMS
• Excel/CSV Spreadsheet
• Jogger.pl
• Live Space (MSN Space)
• Mambo
• Motime – Splinder
• Pivot
• Plone
• PostNuke
• Nucleus CMS
• Radio Userland
• Roller
• Typo
• web-log.nl
• Xanga

With the explosion of social networking and free blog sites, it is easier than ever to create your own blogs with just a few clicks of the mouse. The questions that don’t get asked are, do I own the content I create? If I upload images, are they still mine? What happens if this service goes away?

Where as social networking sites are great, ultimately they are at the hands of other companies. What they choose to do with their services, you have no choice but to go along with it, or delete your account.

Here are 13 reasons why you should purchase hosting and own your own blog.

1. Control
Whether you like it or not, MySpace, Facebook and Blogger all have rules and limitations that you have to abide to. It may not seem like a big deal at first, but as you decide to grow your blog, and expand your brand, they’ll soon become apparent.

2. Customization
Not all services allow you to make the site your own. Tumblr, Facebook and WordPress.org all have some sort of customization abilities, but is it enough? Just adding your logo or picture in the sidebar can be outside the limits of some free services.

With the number of blogs growing dramatically every day, it can sometimes be hard to know if a blog is worth reading or not.

If you are a web surfer looking for new blogs here are a few trigger points that can help you determine if a blog is worth reading or not. If you are a blogger, generating content, use this list as an audit to help ensure your blog is attracting visitors, not turning them away.

Design – The blog design is the visitors first impression.  Is it well designed or is there to much clutter?  Is it a custom design or a basic template?  The blog design is very important, much like how the way one dresses can impact how others perceive them even before talking to them.

Post Frequency – Is there one post a day, week or month?  Maybe ten or more a day.  It’s hard to say what is the best post frequency, but blog owners don’t want to flood readers with posts yet they don’t want to leave them hanging for weeks on end with nothing new.  The best is to try and keep a blogging schedule.  Set aside 2 hours one day (or a few days) a week to write a post.  This can help keep a steady pace.

With the release of WordPress 2.7 paged comments became a built in feature. By default, they are enabled on both new installs and upgrades.  Where it may be good for usability, it may not be good for SEO.

From a usability standpoint, paged comments are good for posts that get a lot of comments.  By default, WordPress cuts them off at 50 comments per page.  Users then don’t have to wait for over 100, or even 1,000, comments to load.  Yes I have seen posts with over 1,000 comments.  The time it takes for a page with lots of comments to load can be much longer than the user is willing to wait.  Breaking them into pages speeds up page loading time and makes the site more user friendly.

From an SEO standpoint, paged comments can hinder the post.  With paged comments, each page has a separate URL and the post itself is duplicated across each page.  This can cause duplicate content issues and visitors could be entering your site on comment page 3 of a post.  Ideally, they’d all enter on the main post page.