What makes for a good blog post - when blogging to get noticed?

My April fool's blog, New Research Suggests Cheese Diet Improves Performance by up to 60%, in the space of 4 weeks, became iStadia's most read blog post.

Of course, the blog itself was complete rubbish. But is was viewed a lot of times in a short space, so what can we learn from it?

I don't know what the secret is. Perhaps there is a very popular set of keywords in there, such as "cheese diet" that I stumbled upon. What I do know is this:

- It has a descriptive title that uses words that are also contained in the text of the post, such as "cheese" and "performance". Google seems to like that. It likes that more than it likes clever titles.

- It has all of the potential keywords from the body text repeated in the tags list. So, there's more repetition. Title - text - tags. Get your keywords in all three.

- Some of the keywords are pretty irrelevant, but probably help - such as "Saint Nectair". So, if you are blogging about some aspect of sports performance, for example, why not try to incorporate names of sports people, brands or other words that are likely to be popular search terms?

- I've used a picture. If you include pictures - even from other sources, and include your keywords in the alt text and description you may suddenly find that you get a lot of hits through Google image search.

- It isn't long - and it doesn't have to be. 500 words is about the most you should have in a blog post.

- I "dugg" my own post, and tagged it on del.icio.us and stumbleupon and probably some other social bookmarking sites. I also posted a link on twitter. This is all very easy , as we have put a button saying "addthis" at the bottom of every blog and article post for you.

- I put my signature in it, with a link to my own site, embedded in a key phrase "sport psychologist". Even if no-one like the blog itself, it is a valuable link that helps my own site gain rankings.

- The blog itself, as I've already acknowledged, is nonsense, as it was intended to be. You don't have to blog about serious things, but the more you blog, taking the lessons above into account, the more you can attract traffic to your profile or your own website.

There's a basic rule on the web. The more "stuff" you put out there, the more people you will reach. Don't wait until you think you have something desperately important to say. Just get on there and share.