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12 Blog design tips to keep your visitors and advertisers happy

One of the forums I’m on has a discussion about best blogging practices. Here’s a few tips that I just added to the thread that you might consider for your own blog design. I’ve written these suggestions mainly with bloggers who write posts for which they get compensation by advertisers in mind, but I think these suggestions are good guidelines for most bloggers.

It’s nice when a blog design reflects your personal style or co-ordinates well with your niche topic.

If you are writing posts for compensation or selling ad space in you sidebar your blog should probably have a professional image. This doesn’t mean plain and boring.

1. If you are using a standard template that 1000’s of other bloggers are using personalize it in some way to reflect your blogs style. If you aren’t sure how to do this ask people on a web forum or hire someone to spruce up your site.

2. Avoid flashing buttons and images.

3. For the most part write your posts in one color of text and one font size. (There are some blogs with multicolored posts and I find them hard to read.)

4. Make sure that the font that you’ve chosen for your blog is easy to read and is of a color that can be read easily against the background color of your blog. Bright white text on dark or black backgrounds tires the eye quickly and is hard to read. If your blog has a dark background a light gray text seems to work best.

* In general I think dark blog backgrounds are frowned upon by quite a few bloggers (and possibly advertisers). Why? I’m not sure, but I think it’s mainly because they are often harder to read and as a result are thought of as not being well designed.

5. Avoid autoplay music! I think the majority of bloggers dislike autoplay music on blogs. If you want to have music on your site please have it in the off mode and let your visitors turn it on if they want to hear it.

You want your visitors to read your posts. It’s hard to concentrate sometimes when music is blaring at you, particularly if the visitor doesn’t like that style of music.

6. Avoid autoplay video. See above. Let your visitors turn the videos on if they want to view them. Anything autoplay is distracting.

7. Try to make sure that your visitors can navigate your site easily. You may actually see your traffic or page views increase if you follow some of these suggestions:

– Think about making your post titles clickable so visitors can easily read the comments that have been left on the post and possibly add their own.

– Likewise be sure that your visitors can see the comment link easily so that they can leave a comment if they want to.

– I’m sure advertisers love to see comments on posts, I know regular site visitors do, so do everything possible to make it easier for your visitors to leave you a comment. That includes not making your visitors register to your site just to leave a comment.

8. At the end of your main page, and possibly on your single posts, have navigation tags so that your visitors can easily move to the next page or next post.

9. If you like buttons or if you have very long blogrolls, categories, or archives think about moving them to pages rather than keeping them in your sidebar, or try drop down menus. Your sidebar will look less cluttered and your page might load faster.

10. Sites with only one post on the main page or dozens can be frustrating for visitors. If you have too many posts the site will load very slowly. If you only have one post your visitor might not click through to the next page to see what other fabulous posts you’ve written. New posts should probably be on your main page for a day or two, so gauge how many posts to include on the front page by how many you normally write on the average day. I think five to ten posts is probably a good amount to have on the main index page.

11. Using slang in your posts can be fun or even funny sometimes, but don’t over do it. It can make your posts harder to read and even understand, and if you are creating blog posts for advertisers they probably want you to use proper words. On that note, if you are writing a post in English don’t mix your native language into the post. It just makes it harder for English readers to follow and understand.

12. It’s also a good idea to spell and grammar check your posts before publishing. Most browsers have plugins or extensions that can be added to help you check spelling and grammar as you type.

Practicing some or all of these tips should keep your visitors happy and you might even start to see an increase in your traffic. Remember an increase in the quality of your site and in your traffic could enhance your ability to monetize your blog.

Good Luck!

DIY Search engine Optimization tips #2

by Tricia

Continued from DIY Search Engine Optimization Tips #1

6. When writing your articles or posts on your pages be sure to include important keywords and search phrases at the beginning, middle and end of the article.

If you are using good writing technique when composing your pages and articles you shouldn’t have a problem with this phase of SEO. As you might know, a well written article usually begins with a paragraph that describes what the body of the article will be about; the mid section of your article goes into more detail or greater depth regarding your initial statement in the first paragraph; the end of the article should come to a conclusion regarding the information you have discussed in the mid portion of the article.

Write naturally, but do remember to use terms within your post that might be used by people when they are searching for the type of information that your article contains.

7. Place your keywords and phrases in the link text of your web pages.

Keywords should be used in your links. When you are linking to another page or subpage on your site use a descriptive keyword or phrase to describe the clickable link. Don’t use terms like “click here” as that offers no description of what the link is for the search engines.

8. Make sure your site can be navigated easily by your visitors as well as search engines

When someone links to your site, or when you submit your site to a search engine it is often only the index page of the site that is given to the search engine. When the search engine visits your site it will index your main page. Your main page should contain some links that lead deeper into your site but if you have a javascript based navigation system the search engine spiders may not follow the links deep into your site as easily as if your links are text (html) based.

9. Build a site map page or use the Google sitemap option.

It’s important to get all of the pages on your site indexed by the search engines. Creating a page that contains links to all of the pages within your site, a sitemap, helps the search engine in this matter. As you probably know, visitors using your sitemap will be able to find items on your site easier as well.

You can create an xml version of your sitemap and submit it to Google Sitemaps. Google has links to third party XML sitemap creators in it’s Webmasters tools area. Once you’ve created your xml sitemap you can submit it to the sitemap area and google’s spiders will visit your site on a regular basis depending upon how often you update your site.

10. Off-site optimization

Now that you know how to optimize your site, and write articles and sub pages for search engine optimization you should concentrate on off site optimization. Google places a high measure of importance as to where you site is ranked on factors such as how many other sites link to your page, the page rank of the sites linking to your site, and the type of sites linking to your site.

The best way to get off site links of course is to create a website with valuable information that will make others want to link to you. If you exchange links with other sites try to exchange links with sites that are similar to your own. For example if you have a gardening site you should attempt to link up with other gardening sites – of all types.

You can also write informative articles and get them published on other websites which will result in a link back to your site. This may also help increase the amount of visitors coming to your site as well. Submit your links to all of the main directories- Google, Yahoo, MSN, the Open directory, and directories that are perhaps related to your sites genre as well. Participate in forums in order to promote your site and perhaps get more visitors to your site as well.

All of the tips that I have listed should help you promote your site and get better rankings on the main search engines.

DIY Search engine Optimization tips #1

by Tricia

Individual website owners and bloggers usually can’t afford to pay SEO (Search Engine Optimization) companies to optimize their sites so that they reach the top of the search engines, however there are a lot of things that you can do yourself to improve your page rank and publicize their sites.

Here’s some tips

1. Plan your site for optimization from the beginning.

Start by choosing a domain name that includes words that could be considered important keywords for your site. For example, if you are creating a gardening site it would be great to have the word garden or gardening in your domain name. Use keywords when you create pages on your site too. A sub page of a gardening site might be called rosegardening.html .

Titles of posts in your blog – if your blog is for a specific niche should also contain keywords that pertain to the post and to the theme of the site itself.

2. keep search engines in mind as you design your site

Search engines use the text on a site to figure out what the site is about, and in part, where to place it on the search pages. If you use photos on your site always use the alt text tag to describe what the photo is about. This will make the search engines spiders and robots job easier.

Sites designed with flash format are difficult for search engines to navigate and index, as they don’t contain much text for the search engines to use to classify the site.

It’s also been said that long strips of java script might be better put in an external file that is called upon from the main page or CSS style files.

3. Each page of your site should have it’s own title tag

It’s very simple to make sure that each page has a title – simple use a Meta Title tag in the header for each page, and individually give each page it’s own title. Search Engines look at the title of each page as being one of the most important factors in telling it’s robots and spiders what the page is about. As per my earlier example if you created a gardening site and you talked about different types of plants on the various sub-pages you would want each page to have a title that contains information about the plant that is being discussed in the page. For example a sub page of the gardening site my have the title “Growing Daisies” if it discussed how to grow daisies.

Title tags should also contain important keywords that will help people find that specific page on your site when they are using a search engine. Think about what words you would choose to search for the type of information that your page is about and use some of those words in the title.

The main page of a gardening site might have a title tag – “Gardening- plants for the garden, gardening tips, and gardening FAQ’s”

4. Be sure to add a description tag to each of your pages:

A description tag is as important as the title tag. The first couple of sentences on your page should summarize what the page is about using important keywords and search phrases that you think people would use when searching for that page.

A gardening sites description tag might say “XYZ Gardening provides information to gardeners about growing plants in the garden, plant profiles, gardening tips and advice.”

5. Put your keywords into headers and headlines on your page.

Search engines give high value to the use of header tags on a page. Header tags are used to enclose the title of an article or as a sub heading in a page. I can’t write the full code here but the tags are H1 H2 H3 H4 and so on. The headline of your page should have a H1 header tag around the words.

Good blog themes often come with CSS style sheets that incorporate important items like header tags into the theme. You shouldn’t really have to think of this feature on a well made blog theme, but if you are writing and designing your own site or theme please remember that header tags are very important.

Please remember that article titles and sub-headings within an article or page should contain important keywords as well. Use words that best describe the content of the article or page when you make a header tag.

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