With so many bloggers on the web, making your blog stand out from the crowd is becoming harder. Here are some tips for improving the performance of your blog.

1 Know your market - once you know who you are targeting with your blog and have done keyword research based on the main topics you are promoting, make sure your blog posts are all relevant to this subject matter and make use of the keywords you have identified.

2 Fresh Content - make sure your blog is regularly updated and fresh - a blog is no good if the content is out of date and keeping the blog updated will encourage both users and search engines to visit the site more often.

3 Original Content - make sure the content you post on your blog is unique - duplicate content will result in you being penalised by the search engines and will effect your blog performance. Getting ideas from other people's website is all well and good but make sure you don't copy them word for word - your blog should be your own work - selling your services not someone else's!

4 Utilise Links - when creating a blog post make sure you link through to other blog posts or pages on your website using keyword rich link text -don't use the infamous "click here" or "find out more" link text, use something relevant to what you are linking to. This will increase the relevancy of the post, your site and encourage both search engines and users to follow the link

5 Provide content people want - make sure the information you are providing is the sort of information your customers want to read. People like to read informative blog posts that help them improve how they do things. So if you have questions you are frequently asked - write a blog entry for each question. Provide users with content like this top tips blog or a step by step guide.

6 Check out analytics packages available for your blog tool or website and monitor the results of the work you are doing. Monitor the number of visitors each post gets and work out what works best for your industry based on their performance.

7 Offering a subscription service to your blog is a great idea to cultivate loyalty but ensure you offer full blog posts to your subscribers not just snippets and these full blog posts will keep your subscribers happy

8 Promote your blog posts using websites like Sphinn, Digg and Reddit to attract more users and get promotion for individual blog posts. Yahoo! Buzz is another tool for doing this and if your post does really well you could end up on the front page of Yahoo!

So if you remember to keep your blog relevant, fresh and original your on the right path