Out of the hundreds of millions of blogs in existence today, whether it’s due to your promotion, a quality referral, or simply dumb luck, a reader somehow ends up on yours! So how do we ensure we captivate our new guest?
I think we can all agree that many blogs are terrible. Visitors can tell whether or not they want to be there in less than five seconds. And even if they stayed long enough to finish reading one article, they better have a reason to stick around.
You know what they say, you only get one chance to make a first impression so to ensure that you introduce yourself in the best way possible, here are 8 things that you should do to capture the attention of the newly acquired visitor:
1. Elegant design and usability
This is your chance to make an instant impression, literally. In a blink of an eye, the visitor could decide to stay or leave based on how your blog looks.
Your blog doesn’t have to be extremely graphic heavy but it must have at least the basic elements of good design and usability. That means it should be easy to read (e.g. font types, font sizes, background contrast) and easy to navigate.
2. Clear niche
The best blogs are often the ones that have an obvious topic. Sprinkling in off-topic posts are OK from time to time if you already have a large following but if you’re just starting up, I would choose a niche and stick with it. It should be really obvious what your blog is about.
3. Bio page
As I recently wrote in my first steps for brand identity article, you better have a bio somewhere. If it’s not a full page, then make sure there’s at least a small bio on the home page and/or the bottom of each article.
This is one of the first things new visitors will look for. Before they commit any more time to your blog, they want to know that you are an authority on your subject. This is one of your cornerstones to building that trust. A nice looking picture of you doesn’t hurt either.
4. Descriptive article titles
If you want your visitor to read other articles on your blog, then your article titles should be descriptive (and catchy) enough to coax them. For example, look at how I named three of my more popular articles:
Deep linking gives old posts new life
NoFollow vs DoFollow: Who wins?
Why having a blog is like having a girlfriend
You can pretty much tell what the articles are about.
5. Quality content
This is a no-brainer but how many times have you seen a good blogger post a bad article? Sometimes, these bloggers feel obligated to stick to a posting schedule and on bad days, they deliver a piece of garbage just to meet the quota. If it were up to me, I’d skip the bad article and leave the previous good article one up at the top.
Look at it this way, each article you write has a chance of being the first (and only) article a new visitor reads. That means you can’t afford to have any bad posts.
6. Descriptive anchor text
As I wrote in my anchor text for SEO article, you must consider how you’re labeling your links. The text will allow your new visitor to see other related posts.
7. Featured articles
Although you may be proud of all of your articles, some are classics that you don’t want buried deep inside your site. Make a featured articles area so they can be prominently displayed.
8. Good use of categories
Archives by month is nice but really, who uses those? People want to see a logical breakdown based on topics. That means you should have a set of sub-niche categories on your home page and nothing should be “uncategorized”. Keeping it to 4-7 categories gives you bonus points.
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Every website worth its name is today swearing by Google Page Rank. To put it simply, Google Page Rank is a tool developed by Google, based on clearly defined set of algorithms, to determine the importance of a website or a webpage. PR or Page Rank is determined by the number of websites linking to the particular website. Here the catch is that the linking websites should be relevant to the linked website and must have high page ranks themselves.
Search Engine Optimization is at the root of the need for improving the Page Rank of a website. The higher your Google PR, the higher your website would be listed in the Google Search. The more number of websites are linked to yours, the more votes you would get for getting a higher PR.
The relevance of the linking websites is very important. Mere linking to websites whose page ranks are abysmally low, does not in any way help to get your PR improved. There are no easy approach to improving your PR all of a sudden. Obviously if you are exchanging links with reputed websites with high Page Rankings, then you are well on your way to improving the PR of your website. Here again the relevance of the linking websites to your website is very crucial.
A Web Development website would achieve no purpose if it were to link with many internet marketing or art websites.
Linking to websites without exchanging or adding their links to your website is actually more rewarding. But this often comes at a price. Free linking without exchanging is often a waste of time since most of the free-linking websites make you wait interminably.
Page Rank of the website or webpage linking with your site is very important. This determines the number of votes that your website receives on account of such linking. Every new website or webpage starts with a Page Rank Zero. Google updates the Page Rank on a regular basis. Hence care must be taken to ensure that the web page you are linking with has a high PR.
It is better to ensure that there are fewer links outgoing on the page that you are linking with, so that you receive more PR value. The higher the links, the larger the sharing of PR value. To explain further, if you link with a webpage with PR of 6 which has 100 outgoing links, the PR value you receive would be considerably less than that you would receive when you link with a webpage of PR 4 which has only 10 outgoing links.
Web pages which display your links in Java Script do not help you improve your PR. Similarly if your links are ones which are redirected ,they too have no value or bearing on your PR. Most websites which offer free linking services actually trick their clients by such links which have no value.
Page Rank of your website can be improved considerably by two methods. One is to build a website with such quality and content that other websites would automatically want to link with. The PR would improve dramatically on its own. The other method is if you are building a marketing or product oriented website, then better work hard by link building with high PR websites.
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