While blogs have become the next great thing for many in the search engine and online marketing worlds, like anything else on the web, they are quite often misused. Common mistakes that could easily be corrected keep many blogs from being the viral marketing and customer relations tools that they could be. To that end, usability guru Jakob Nielsen outlines the ten most common blog design mistakes.

On the list...

• 1. No author biography (a lack of a descriptive "About" page)
• 2. No author photo
• 3. Nondescript posting titles (no microcontent)
• 4. Links don't say where they go (link text such as "here" or "there")
• 5. Classic hits are buried (no chance for newcomers to find popular posts)
• 6. The calendar is the only navigation (no categories)
• 7. Irregular publishing frequency
• 8. Mixing topics (not becoming a niche blogger and expert of a chosen field)
• 9. Forgetting that you write for your future boss (flames/ rants don't look too good once your prospective employer googles you)
• 10. Having a domain name owned by a weblog service

Find out more about why these things matter on Nielsen's site.