Many bloggers don’t pay enough attention to blog designs while blogging. In actuality, design of blogs is very important for the blogs success. Here’s a blogger’s guide to SEO friendly blog design.
By design I mean the organization of your blog pages. How should one organize content, images, video, categories etc to make it look pleasing to the eye? And eventually to make it easy and intuitive for blog users to navigate and read what they want.
First take stock of what you want on the blog home: main content, recent posts, recommended blogs, search bar, contact us, sign up for newsletter, subscribe to feed, site map and more. Then think about what users would like to see on your blog and what would readers do when they land on your blog home page.
Depending on what users are most likely to do, you decide on your right, left, top or bottom navigation. Get the most important things right up at the top – recent posts, categories, search bar, about, contact us, downloads, feeds/ subscribe to newsletter etc.
Choosing the template themes
Depending on the topic of your bloging, choose the theme. If it’s serious, get themes that are neat. If you’re blogging about products, travel or gadgets, then you get a flashy, colorful blog theme.
Touching the code
If you don’t know html, I suggest that you don’t tinker with the code. Use what’s there in a theme that suits you best. In case you’re using blogger.com, use drag and drop.
Creating a blog that’s pleasing to the eye
Just ask yourself. Would I stay on a blog for long it’s hard on my eyes? Will I close a page, if it’s not aesthetically good. Most blog readers will bounce off if there’s clutter on a blog. So keep it easy on the eye. But use images to enhance the beauty.
Test and tweak after a while
Google analytics will provide you some clues to how people actually navigate through the blog home page. The map overlay will tell you what content they are seeing the most. You can them rearrange content according to your analysis.
I keep repeating, search engines like Google only want to give it’s users the best sites. And keep sending more traffic to sites that users love, read lot of pages, spend more time on, frequent and recommend to others. Therefore, make user feel comfortable, quickly give them what they want – quality content and you’ll succeed as a blogger.
And that’s why a well designed blog that users love becomes Search Engine friendly.
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