If you are starting a blog, what is the best blogging software that you can use? Which is easy to set-up, fantastic to customise and well search engine optimised?

In my view, there is only one truly great piece of blogging software on the internet. But it is not always the best for all people, there are sometimes alternatives whilst not the best for the masses, are better for distinct niches?

So what attributes make up the best blogging software on the market? I believe that it has to:

• Be free to use – there are so many paid for blogging tools about, why pay for software?
• Be flexible and extendible – if you want to add a feature to it, such as site maps, captcha checked contact forms, this must be easy to do.
• Be easy to set-up and install.
• Be easy to make it look different to other blogs – there is no point in running a professional blog that looks like 3,000,000 other blogs.
• Have ready made (and free) off-the-shelf styles readily available to install at the touch of a button.
• Be well search engine optimised and accepted by the search engines.
• Ideally, it should have a community of other bloggers that can also drift over to your new blog from related blogs.

Well, in my view WordPress.org ticks all but the last of the above boxes. There is just that last box left unticked. In fact, if you look into WordPress.com, that does have the community of bloggers in the version of WordPress that it hosts, but there is not the flexibility and if you are running schemes such as paid posting, you are not allowed to run a blog there.

WordPress is also easy to install. If you are comfortable with downloading, unzipping and FTPing to a server, then it is simple to set-up and create it onto almost any paid hosting account. If you are not so technically competent and are just setting up a blog for tasks such as working from home, then the other great news about WordPress is that a lot of hosts have simple installation systems. With these, you buy the domain name and some hosting and simply press a button or two and the software is installed for you.

But, what if you don’t want to, or can’t afford to, pay for hosting? Well, there are still pieces of blogging software to use and in this case, take a look at Blogger, which is my second favourite for blogging. There are not so many avenues open to you, but it is still only a few clicks to install Google Adsense to earn a bit of cash and you are allowed to earn some extra cash through paid posting.

So, that is my recommendations for the best blogging software. Ideally you should install WordPress, but if you don’t want to pay a penny for the tool, then take a look at Blogger. Between them, they have everything covered. Happy blogging and feel free to leave a comment as to how you got on with your new blog.

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