5 easy ways to improve your blog might sound bogus. We bloggers are always on the lookout for easy ways to improve our blogs, drive more traffic to our contents, make our blogs easily navigable, optimize speed thereby requiring some check up for broken links, over-sized photos and so on.
It’s still January so technically, it’s still the beginning of a new year , we are still making changes and improving our blogs, revamping our personal style while thinking of more ways to do better this year.
Since i started blogging, I’ve found myself learning photography, editing, html codes, css and other internet and techy stuffs. As a student on a budget, i don’t have the luxury of hiring people to design or manage my blog, so i figure out stuffs by myself by reading tutorials and trying them out.
I will like to think my blog looks presentable but I still find 1 or 2 things to improve on daily. I’m no pro, however these are 5 things i take notice of when i visit other blogs and i suppose if i notice them, so would other visitors….
If you haven’t already implemented any of these tips on your blog, then you should. Thank me later.
5 easy ways to improve your blog this year
1. Add a Search widget for easy navigation to older or specific posts that can’t be easily found on your homepage. Sometimes i want to check how a blogger i admire styled a particular piece or trend, scrolling through each post searching for this look would take a lot of time. With the option to search, it becomes easy to find what you’re looking for within seconds.
2. Resize your photos to fit your post body area. This not only makes your posts look neater but reduces the loading size of the photo, displays the photos at their originally saved pixels without compression and losing lots of pixel – quality and also makes them load faster thereby helping your page to load faster.
If you would rather the width of all photos in your posts resized automatically to a width of your choosing, you can do it with css, paste the code below into your blog’s Css and replace the colored numbers to your desired width.
.post-body img {
width: 700px;
height: auto;
}
.post table.tr-caption-container img {
width: 700px;
height: auto;
}
You can use the two methods because resizing the photos before uploading reduces the image sizes mostly to kb instead of large mb sizes while automatically resizing photos with css after uploading doesn’t reduce their size, it only makes them fit into your specified width so you will still be left with large sized images to load.
3. Remove unnecessary widgets and add-ons. There’s no need to overpopulate your blog with lots of gadgets or add ons solely for decoration. These could either distract your visitors from your main contents, slow down your blog or just plain awful to someone who just stumbled upon your blog for the first time.
You know what they say about first impressions and the attention span of the current generation. Minimal looks more professional and navigable. I’m still getting there myself, I need to declutter more.
One particular widget i dislike is the music widget, the moment i open a site and i hear music which may be in a public place or a really quiet place, the first thing that comes to mind is to close the site immediately without even looking for where the pause button is and maybe reopen the site later if i really need to.
This doesn’t look so good on your bounce rate especially if you are still struggling to get traffic to your blog. If people want to listen to music, they know where to find and play any music they like whenever they like, but then again it’s just my opinion.
4. Leave insightful comments on related sites/blogs. Don’t leave comments that are totally unrelated to posts just to drop your links. 99.9% of the time, the blog owners detect these type of comments and never really click through. If there was a topic being discussed and you were asked for an opinion on it or not, leaving a concise comment regarding the topic will draw attention to you naturally, someone would definitely be interested in what you also have to say on your own blog.
Don’t post on random sites, stick to your niche or sites with some related contents to yours, build relevant linkbacks. You can use this code:
<a href=”Your Url”>Your Text</a> to leave links on sites that accept <a> tags to make them clickable especially on blogger blogs. Join communities like IFB to find and interact with other bloggers.
5. Improve your posts for SEO. Well, while you should improve your posts for your readers, you should also consider attracting more readers to these improved posts. Search engines can bring in lots of traffic to your blog, even though some people think seo isn’t as efficient as it used to be in the past, it still works. Majority of my traffic comes from organic google searches – both texts and images.
Try creating posts with post titles which answer questions people could be searching for, add trending keywords to your post title but do not overstuff and keep the rest of the post relevant to that title instead of post titles which do not really mean anything or unrelated to your post. Use Alt tags in your image properties for your images. Above all, create contents worth reading, seo or not.
This post is not a tutorial, this is more like maintenance tips for bloggers that have been blogging for a while, so if you are just starting out or you don’t understand how to do any of the listed, feel free to ask questions in the comments section also feel free to suggest what you would like improved on the blog too.
*Note that: All images are for my blog, screenshots taken at different times to illustrate my point.
At the time of this post, all tips were based on using the blogger blogging platform.
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Till my next post
xx!
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