Nov
22
10 Easy Ways to Improve Your Blog or Website
Filed Under Best Practices, Best of 2009, Blogging, Networking and Marketing Strategy, Search Engines, Social Media and Social Networking Sites, Web Marketing
Like you, I typically visit many blogs and websites each day.
Some web sites clearly have it together. They have lots of traffic and appeal to visitors.
Other sites aren’t bad. They have good potential. With a few tweaks here and there, they could enjoy much more traffic and appeal much more to their audience.
I promised myself that I’d write up some suggestions for improving blogs and websites. I realize that while much is possible, we can’t hope to do everything. We need to apply the 80/20 rule and focus on strategies and techniques that are easy to implement yet promise substantial benefits:
- Make Your Text Easier to Read - Some months ago, I noticed that my blog’s text wasn’t visually sharp enough. It was difficult to read. Upon examination, I noticed that the font wasn’t quite black, and the background wasn’t totally white. The links were grayish. After a few minor theme changes, the color scheme was improved. Low contrast combinations or light text on a dark background always require extra effort to read.
- Optimize for Human Eyeballs - A site’s title tells search engines and their users what the site is about. The title is the bold headline in search engine results. Using keywords in your site’s title can help you rank higher for those keywords. Recently, I changed the title of my blog hoping to rank higher on more keywords, and my traffic fell. The new title was unfortunately less relevant and less appealing to my potential readers. I changed my title back, and traffic rebounded. The takeaway: Optimize for humans, not just for search engines.
- Use Headings to Break Up Long Articles - Headings break up an article into sections and help make the article easy to scan and read. Limiting paragraph size helps too. Headings, however, like titles, can tell search engines what an article is about and are an excellent place to insert your keywords.
- Link Out - I provided a rationale for linking out to other sites in The Blogger’s Guide to Links and Comments: “Use of outbound links enhances your pages in ways that both search engines and people can easily appreciate.” The advice in that article applies equally to blogs and conventional websites. Unless you’re linking to ads, use only dofollow links.
- Link Internally - This can be huge. Linking internally increases a site’s circulation, and it increases the perceived relevance of both the linking page and the page linked to. Link to another page or article on your site when you have the opportunity. In a blog, you can even link to a tag, as I often do. A blog site map such as the once generated by the Wordpress plugin Really Simple Sitemap makes it easy for visitors to find a blog’s archived content. I use internal links on my blog nearly everywhere, even in places which aren’t obvious.
- Be Social - Adding a social dimension to your web presence makes you real and credible. Join all the major social networking sites, and let visitors know how they can connect with you. Google Friend Connect and Facebook NetworkedBlogs widgets add sociability to your site and enable readers to publicly endorse you. Bloggers can join blog networking sites as well such as Technorati, Entrecard, BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog.
- Make Subscription Simple - Make it as easy as possible for readers to subscribe to your blog or newsletter. Blogs should offer subscription by both email (using a service like Aweber) and RSS (using a service like Feedburner). I’m always amazed when I have to hunt for a way to subscribe to a site.
- Use Social Bookmarking - Make your content easier to find and, as is the case with some social bookmarking sites, create quality links into your blog or website. Some of the social bookmarking sites I use are Digg, Delicious, Propeller, Reddit, diigo, Jumptags, Google Bookmarks and iZeby.
- Encourage Comments - Not only do I generally ask readers to comment, but I comment back as well whenever it’s appropriate.
- Extend Your Domain - If your domain will expire with the next twelve months, you might be signaling to search engines and savvy visitors that your site is only temporary.
I’ve omitted other ways that you can improve your site, because they’re harder to implement, and because they’ll give me something to discuss in a subsequent article. 
In any case, we have our work cut out for us. 
What do you think?
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29 Responses to “10 Easy Ways to Improve Your Blog or Website”
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I think that your way of optimizing your site is correct, but I read in many other blogs that the way of improving the blog reputation or quality needs a lot of things, maybe about 200.
Do you have a good plugin for social bookmarking for a WordPress blog?
Hi Larry,
This is Source Blogger…
I read your blog when it updates, on occasion.
Just a few recommendations for your site.
1) Tweak the font style. Needs to be more “reader-friendly.”
2) Increase Your Font Size (I am viewing your site on a Samsung SyncMaster 213T 21″ LCD Flat Panel Monitor.) It is still too small.
3) Place larger space between paragraphs.
4) Define your links. Some readers see colored, bolded links as emphasis, not a hyperlink. Use 0000FF (Blue) and underline.
Thanks,
Source Blogger
@Bachrum
There are many more factors to consider, but these ten are relatively easy and a good start.
One useful plugin which I mention in Why WordPress? Plus List of My Top Dozen WordPress Plugins is AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget, but I do my social bookmarking using Social Marker.
@Source Blogger
Thank you for your input.
Some good advice Larry, I’ll have to check and see if my site is configured this way, and make some changes.
Thanks Larry
Thanks Larry for some really good advice and for the links. They are very helpful.
Thanks for these tips, I find social networking still the most difficult to implement, especially for a new site, do you have tips for that?
Also, I never knew about Aweber, thanks for pointing that out.
Larry,
More great content. Thank you.
I look forward to your posts.
Inez
Great article. I’m new to blogging and slow to add all these features, so I’m glad you posted it. It allows me to go back and enhance my site. Thanks!
Hi Larry,
Thanks so much for the tips. I must say that I have never used internal links in my blog, but will start doing it right away now. I’m probably going to rethink my design, too. I’ve tried to make it look nice, but am now wondering if I have sacrificed easy readability. Thank you!
Hi Larry,
As always, good information. I’ve done many of the things you suggest and will work on the others. Thanks again!
Deb
Great advice Larry! I hadn’t really given much thought to internal linking, will definitely be giving the site a tweak or two now. Thanks again for another great article!
Great article and I am going to share it with my over 6,000 twitter followers.
I would add one thing - as a proofreader and editor one of my biggest pluses or minuses on judging a blog is good editing - I have read some really great WRITING showcases that totally lose their power, for lack of a better term, with typos and misspellings and bad grammar.
There are a lot of terrific blogs that I visit in either my proofreading capacity or just as a reader but I cannot for the life of me recommend or share ones with more than a couple of the minuses.
Fair or not, unless it is just a fun / pleasure blog, these things do make a difference to some readers AND if someone is blogging for business, it REALLY DOES MATTER!
thanks for the wonderful tips!
Jan
Great tips, Larry (as usual). The linking tips are very important. Allow me to add one extra tip - keep your blog post titles to less than 70 characters (to allow for easy re-tweeting).
I’m always learning how to make my blog better. Thankfully you’re pointing me in the right direction.
Mel, My Space Effects, Inez, Dani, Jenny, Deb and Delores, Thank you all for your encouragement.
@Wil Looks like you’re on the right track. You might consider adding Google Friend Connect or a Facebook fan page.
@Cheryl You put me off until way after your morning coffee. Wonder what that means.
@Jan Good point. I’m planning to discuss content and research in upcoming articles.
@Chris Thank you for adding that. Let’s speak soon.
Hi Larry. This is an awesome article. Great tips for bloggers. Thanks for sharing. My blog is going to 100 articles, I’m inviting you to write a little tips on my blog. What do you think?
Thank you Latief.
Keep up the good work.
Hopefully we can do it some time in the future.
Hi Larry,
I think this is a never ending topic that will always need adding to/updating - ( 10 more easy ways etc) … and attract plenty of visitors/comments. This type of post nearly always adds something important to my own “things-to-do-list” - and then it’s a question of prioritising them appropriately. Adding the FB widget is something I’m going to do immediately by the way. Thanks for reminding me!
Cheers
Will
Hi Will,
You’re a step ahead of me. However, most of the steps people will need to take to improve their blogs and web sites will not be as easy as these ten.
In any case, I’m very happy you found my article useful.
I enjoyed the article but my brain gagged on #10. Savvy visitors may actually look up my domain expiration date, but would a search engine really do that? I wouldn’t think a search engine would “care” about how long I send my money to the registrar…please elaborate on that if you would. Thanks!
Thank you for an excellent question, Buck.
Once of the main challenges a search engine faces is to validate the authenticity of each web site.
You and I, the search engines and everybody else, we all know that there’s no shortage of make-a-quick-buck spam websites on the Net.
Do you believe that the owners of these sites would be willing to pay for multiple year domain registrations?
No?
Right.
Well, the search engines don’t believe so either.
Consider the possibility then, that a website with a multiple year registration might score higher in authenticity than a similar site with only a one year registration.
The same holds true for dedicatedIP addresses vs. shared ones, but I’ll save that for a future discussion.
Hi Larry. Once again, you’ve enlightened me. I never thought about multiple year domain registration in that way before. Thanks for pointing that out.
Also, I will use the sitemap plugin starting today. That’s just for starters because as usual, your article is jam packed! Thanks!
Hi Larry,
Very nice tips.
Great tips Larry. I was wondering about another point related to the layout - about the three column format in particular. I had a few regular readers complaining that the three column format makes their life difficult. Did you hear any such remarks?
Ajith,
Never heard complaints about 3-column blogs. They are certainly very useful for the blogger, since they make it possible to show twice as much on sidebars “above the fold” than do 2-column blog.
Thank you for your comment.
Great article Larry, very detailed. These tips would surely help a lot of aspiring bloggers out there. Keep it up!
You got it one hundred percent right in those ips you give to websites owners. But there is also a case of Google’s chiefs changing their rules of search from time to time. That is big threat to anyone that is not keeping up the newest and latest information about SEO tactics. E.g., meta tags are no longer so important and regional proximity of links is much more important. We need to remember that there are no static rules. Everything moves slowly forward.
Hey Larry,
All great tips that I agree with. I just renewed my domain as it was expiring in 11 days. Definitely a mistake of mine
[…] honor of his 58th birthday. He talks about why one should have a blog for one’s business and 10 Easy Ways to Improve Your Blog or Website. Larry doesn’t just spout out his ideas and then walk away; if you ask him to give you […]