Archive for the 'Easy idea' category

The feeds to your blog are a great way to keep visitors coming back to your site. Make sure that your RSS feed button is placed prominently: I suggest 2 strategic locations, one at the top of the editorial section, one in the footer of the page (they will be easy, but out of the way). To that, add another link/button just after the last words of each individual article (to catch the eye of the reader before he/she leaves).

In any case, always use the standard logo, since readers will be looking for it, and it catches the eye.

Also, make sure that the HTML headers of your pages point to your site RSS feed: It ensures that RSS-aware browsers like Opera or Firefox will find/recognize it.

Here is the example extracted from this real web site:

Easy to follow to get the following RSS orange icon in the address bar of your visitors browser.

You may want to think that your best work is the most recent one, but visitors disagree and made some posts as most popular either by page views or comment count. Since those may be far from the front page make it simpler to jump to them by adding a list of these to your sidebar or menu, with one of the popularity-oriented plugins.

A sizeable part of your traffic will always come from the exterior (search engines, StumbleUpon, Digg). It is important to convince them that they arrived in a great web site. One easy way is to show them what other interesting things they could find around. Just use one of the many plugins that find and display “related posts” (posts that have the bigger chance to keep them reading and coming back later for more). Show such a list near the end of your best posts (or all of them).

When a visitor arrives on a page that does not exist (or not any more, or not yet), a customized error-404 page should be doing a lot to help her. Write such a customized 404 page with -at least- a few indications about how to browse your site (a site map, maybe) and a search engine.

You don’t know it before you try, but many visitors arriving on your web site do not find immediately what they are loking for. It may be that Google did not direct them perfectly or that they remember seeing something useuful and they can’t find it anymore. So you need to help them.

Let me offer two good options:

1. If your web site software integrates a search engine, like WordPress, use it.


2. In any case, you can easily setup a Google AdSense account and -on top of the advertising capacity- you will get access to their search engine for your web site.

Again, there are plenty of plugins to help and you may want to moderate tightly. But this will track the real activity on your blog, even if it happens on old articles long gone from the front page.

There are plenty of plugins to display the names of those whose participation is highest on a period of time. This is a fairly good incentive fo more.

Just make sure you don’t allow empty, useless comments made just to push the score up.

Let’s not be modest. For too many reasons to list, your comments have intrisically more value because they come from the author. So, it should be useful if they were easy to find and highlighted in some form: different font, different color or background color.

Matt Cutts explains how to do this.

photo credit: srqpix

If your blog is still young you may not have a lot of spam… yet. But inevitably, it will reach a point were you will feel overwhelmed by comment approval or removal. Do yourself a favor. If you have a recent version of WordPress, make sure that the Akismet plugin is activated and provide the API key as requested. If your WordPress version is older, just install the Akismet plugin, activate it and provide the API key as requested.

Once done, you will have a button to recheck older comments for spam. Use it.

Merely answering to your visitors will increase a lot the number of comments for two reasons:

1. A comment is not less interesting if you wrote it. I often add a later information this way, rather than modifying the original post.


2. When you answer, you open a talk where there was first only a remark from a visitor.