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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!

Promote your site with a Squidoo lens

by Tricia

Have you heard of Squidoo? I’ve been a member of Squidoo since 2005, shortly after the site opened it’s doors to those who wanted to promote their websites in a very different way.

Squidoo allows members to make what they call a lens. A lens is a window to promote perhaps another sites or a number of similar sites on the internet. You can add as much information to your lens as you like in order to point others towards your website.

I made my first lens, as I said, back in 2005. It was for my reptile and amphibian care website
. I have information on that site about a lot of different reptiles but the majority is for one type of lizard – the water dragon. So what I did was to add snippets of care information to the lens that I created that lead to specific pages on my website where my lens visitors could learn even more in depth information about the care of the water dragon lizard. I did the same thing on another lens for iguana care.

I was also able to add modules to my lens that allowed me to select items from online stores like overstock.com, Amazon and many others for which, if I sold any items through my lens I’d get a percentage of the royalties that Squidoo made off the sale. Profits from a lens can also be donated to a number of charities as well.

I didn’t do much with my lens over the last year, but I’ve recently gone back and given them an overhaul adding new modules and updating the information.

As I said you can do as much or as little to your lens as you’d like. If you were to create one for your website you might add your RSS feed so that visitors could see your latest posts, as well as write a summary of what your site is about. You can also add link modules in order to link to similar types of sites.

I’ve now created lens for all of the blogs that my husband and I run. Each one has a summary of the blog, RSS feeds, links, shopping modules and I’ve added as many tags to the lenses as possible that describe the site accurately so that people will be able to find my lens easily on Squidoo or perhaps even via a search engine.

Visitors to your lens can rank your lens from one to five stars, so if you create a lens try to do a good job so that you’ll get a good rating. I believe the rating system helps with a lens popularity on the site as well.

The people as squidoo also send out newsletters telling members of popular lenses each day and you can apply to have your own lens promoted in order to get more visitors and ratings for your lens.

Check it out for yourself. At the very least it’s another way to promote your website and at the most it’s a way to make a little bit of extra money if your lens does well!

Visit Squidoo to make your own Lens.

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.

Meta

Pages

Search

Archives