Boagworld has used a portal style index for quite some time. Devlounge incorporates more of the concept with each revision they roll out. Now sporting a new portal-ish design (and more than likely the blog which will mark the beginning of a noticeable trend), is ProBlogger.

These blogs et al, are pushing the envelope of blog design as we currently know it, and it’s a good thing. Good for bloggers, good for users. I for one, couldn’t look through ProBlogger’s recent refresh without asking, how can I restructure my own site’s layout in a more functional and friendly way? Especially after reading this.

If you’re not thinking in terms of content organization and presentation for your own blog, perhaps revisiting your goals will help. Content may be king as we’ve all heard too many times, but readership is truly queen of the board. Without it, you’re really just journaling. If you care about readership, your blog is a service.

From a user’s standpoint, some good questions to ask yourself about layout might include:

• Am I featuring my content effectively?
• Can returning visitors quickly find the material they’re looking for?
• Are new visitors easily finding their way around?

From a business perspective:

• Am I funneling readers in as well as I could be, and to the right pages?
• Is my layout generating or hindering income?
• Is there another tack that would get a better CTR, PPC, etc?

Questions like these are difficult to answer but dangerous to avoid in the pro realm. While I don’t consider myself a pro by any means, I know one thing is for sure – it’s time to rethink my own layout.

Web surfers have gotten very good at scanning content, and gleaning the info they need quickly. I love writers and/or designers who recognize this. Too many websites cram the content so tightly together, with no thought to how legible the information is! By borrowing a few techniques from print media, making your site scan-worthy is simple. A few of the most common follow:

Don’t Fear White Space

One of the most important elements in a page’s style is not what’s there, but what isn’t. Creating whitespace helps the eye transition from one element to another – one thought to the next – on through the page. Adding margins and padding to paragraphs, columns, tables, lists, etc., goes a long way toward readability and makes for a clean layout as well.

Appropriately Narrow Columns

Setting up reasonably narrow columns widths makes it much easier to follow the material being presented. Extremely wide columns are difficult for the eye to follow the line. If readers have to focus too intently on the lines, they’re not going to get much out of the information you’re trying to share with them. Keep in mind however, that extremely narrow columns can also be difficult to read.

Tight Paragraphs

Keeping your paragraphs concise (usually 5-7 lines) is a great way to improve the flow of your articles. Long-winded paragraphs can be discouraging to sift through – particularly if your reader is trying to reference one specific sentence.

Smartly Placed Titles

Headings not only serve to visually separate blocks of text, but help readers conceptualize what you’re talking about. This goes back again to white space, but semantically correct titles can also improve your site’s accessibility and SEO!

Funny how that all works together. :)

Spamming is an enterprise I’ve never understood. Do these people actually get clicks and make money? I realize we live in an ad-driven society… junk mail, television and radio commercials are all widely accepted. So why is spam is so loathsome? Because it’s utterly unavoidable.

With TV or radio you can walk away, switch the station or turn them off any time. Telemarketing is annoying but can always hang up (or don’t answer the phone in the first place). Spam gives you no such options. If you want to preserve the integrity of your site, you have to deal with it.

So other than moderating ALL comments, what’s a blogger to do? In addition to Akismet, here are a few highly effective plugins designed to guard against comment spam:

• Moderate Brief Comments – automatically puts into moderation very short and/or one word remarks
• WP-SpamFree Anti-Spam – eliminate automated trackbacks and pingbacks
• Bad Behavior – block link spam generated by robots

Have you experienced success with a particular plugin? By all means, add it here and ease someone’s pain! ;)

E.B. White once said:

“I felt uneasy at posing as an expert on rhetoric, when the truth is I write by ear, always with difficulty, and seldom with any exact notion of what is taking place under the hood.”

I love this quote because it personifies exactly how I feel about my own writing sometimes (and I consider language to be one of my strong suits!). It’s comforting, in a way, to know that such a well known and respected writer could feel that way about his work.

If you find yourself wishing to improve your writing skills and subsequently “find your voice”, I suggest White’s book, The Elements of Style. There’s an illustrated version as well, if your reading list is long and time is short. You might also consider paying a visit to these notable resources:

• Daily Writing Tips – simple ways to improve your writing
• CopyBlogger – strong focus specifically on copywriting

In addition, A List Apart has two thought provoking articles on How to Write a Better Weblog, and 10 Tips on Writing the Living Web.

One last little tip – if you’re looking to expand your vocabulary, a fun and easy way to do it is by adding a “word of the day” module or gadget to your favorite personalized homepage. Before you know it you’ll be spitting out words like pedantic and pontificate. ;) Oh and the dictionary.com search plugin for Firefox is very handy for looking up unknown words on the fly!

• it requires patience and a lot of experimentation
• it’s difficult to test and measure effectively
• it’s very time consuming

Though I’m not a guru by any means, I have learned a few tricks about improving SEO that may help you get started with a little greater understanding than I started with.

Utilize the tools available

Improving search engine optimization could be as simple as adding a plugin such as the All In One SEO Pack to your WordPress installation. With it, you can add a title and keywords to individual posts from within the Write Post panel. You can also tailor meta information regarding your site overall, such as title, description and keywords.

Use appropriate tags

Tagging and categorizing is more than just a means of organizing your content. Other than providing a navigation system or filter mechanism for your visitors, it’s a way of signaling the bots that crawl your site. Useful category names and using tags that relate to your content will help you make friends with the SEs.

Make small changes

The search engines are very secretive about their indexing frequencies, and pinpointing an exact schedule is impossible. We may never know exactly when they crawl our sites, but we can exert some control by making measurable changes to things like ad arrangements, keywords, or product presentations. In other words, don’t change everything all at once, because then you’ll have no frame of reference for which changes are effective.

Track your efforts

Get your hands on a good tool for monitoring and analyzing your stats (incoming traffic, clicks, exiting traffic, etc). Knowing where your traffic is coming from, where it’s going and how people are interacting with your content will help you determine which keywords are performing, which ones might need tweaked and which ones people are searching to search your site. Google Analytics and pMetrics both provide free stats software.

This was intended to be a very brief guide to starting out with SEO. For some fast and easy tips on optimizing your blog, see my article 5 Simple Steps for Improving SEO.

1) Clue users in

Give your readers a little clue about what keyphrase they just searched for by adding a simple statement like “your search for [whatever] returned the following:”.

<?php echo "Your search for <strong>" ."$s". "</strong> produced the following results..."; ?>

This is very useful if your reader performs more than one search. It gives an indication that the phrase they entered is actually the one that was searched for, and is returning relevant results. It’s particularly beneficial if you have closely related topics which might return similar results. Without a visual que, a user might think your search isn’t working properly if they aren’t seeing different returns.

You can also use CSS to style the keyword or phrase so it stands out even more with an eye-catching color, as with <em> or <strong> tags as shown in the example.

2) Show them more

Depending on the settings of your Reading tab preferences, you might only be showing your visitors one post per page. I prefer this approach to multiple posts, but unfortunately it affects search and archive listings as well. No one wants to search your vault one entry at a time. By using the Custom Query String plugin¹, you can customize the number of results listings by a number of variables. Very handy.

Update: (9/28/07) With the release of 2.3, this plugin has now become obsolete, as it references a table in the database which no longer exists.

3) Open your pages

The default search provided by WordPress only searches through your dated material. In other words, your posts. No Pages are included in that search unless you make use of the Search Everything plugin, which allows Pages and comments to be queried as well. A word of warning though… I’ve run into some trouble getting CQS and Search Everything to work together. Something about the combination (at least I think that’s the problem) seems to be disabling relevant results. What I mean is, the search works, but it produces the same results every time, no matter what you search for. If anyone has already experienced this problem and knows of a work-around I’d love to hear of it! :)

4) Cinch up your layout

If you don’t like the way the_excerpt() template tag works in WordPress, you can tweak that a bit too, but using the following snippet in its place:

<?php the_content_rss('', TRUE, '', 50); ?>

Rather than having weird line breaks in your passage which the_excerpt() causes depending on your html, you can condense everything to display in one paragraph, and customize the number of words in your excerpt (represented by 50 above). This is nice for tightening up your search results and/or archive listings. I’m really bad about remembering to write in optional excerpts in my posts, so this works great for me.

5) Put your sidebar to work

I’ve seen a lot of bloggers monetize their search pages via contextual ads, which makes a lot of sense… but if you choose not to go that route you can still make good use of empty space by putting in other maintenance-free items such as related posts, popular posts, etc. This can help to guide visitors back into the funnel, so to speak. :)

Offer a Subscription ~

You can easily stay in touch with readers by allowing them to request email notifications whenever additional responses are added to an entry. It’s a great way for visitors to monitor a discussion after they’ve left their comment and moved on. Any time I see this feature, I use it. It’s just too easy to forget where I’ve left comments, and on what topics. When a blogger offers this I know I don’t have to worry about going back to check for any updates to the conversations I’m interested in. I can get it all from my inbox.

Get Subscribe to Comments

Reveal Related Entries ~

Whether you’re looking for better click-through, or just trying to get your readers to spend more time on your site, displaying related posts on single entry pages is a good way to do both. The Ultimate Tag Warrior, which I just wrote about the other day, is one of my favorite plugins. It will take some time to get all your entries tagged if you’ve been blogging for a while, but once you’re done, you’ll have terrific flexibility at your fingertips when it comes to showing older content. For example, you can list related entries for a post, related tags for a post, related tags for a tag… or all three just by calling a function. Since you can easily style any list with CSS, the display is seamless. There’s also excellent help documentation.

Get Ultimate Tag Warrior

Give Readers The Good Stuff ~

If you want people to click past your home page, I recommend the Top Posts plugin. You can, of course, show your top posts site-wide if you want, but at least get them up on your index page. It will draw more readers in than without it. You can customize the list to show most popular posts by visits, or comments. The drawback is, you can’t do both. You’ll have to pick one. Also note that it takes a little while for the plugin to “realize” which posts are actually your most popular.

Get Top Posts By Category

Show Off Recent Entries ~

Showing your most recent entries is a good idea, because readers can then see what’s going on at a glance. Maybe they haven’t visited in a while, or maybe they are just finding your site for the first time. Give them a broader view of what your blog is about by showing 4 or 5 recent posts. It’s likely something will catch a reader’s attention if your current entry doesn’t do the job. You don’t need a plugin to add this functionality, you can just add a snippet like this:

<?php query_posts('showposts=5'); ?>

or

<?php get_archives('postbypost', 10); ?>

Add Recent Comments ~

Ok, to be fair and honest, I haven’t latched on to this idea yet. I’ve seen bloggers using this feature, and it seems like a great way to give readers an overview of what others are saying. The only reason I haven’t implemented this is to avoid the glaring fact that I’m not getting a steady stream of comments yet. There, I said it. Whew! ;) As readership grows and responses become more frequent, I’m sure I’ll be giving this a test-run. I only mention it because it seems to be popular on a great many blogs. There are a ton of plugins for comment management and so forth, but here are a few specifically for recent comments:

• Brian’s Latest Comments
• Get Recent Comments
• Simple Recent Comments

Alternatively, you could use something like the Show Top Commentators plugin to encourage and/or reward visitors who participate in discussions, by prominently displaying who has been the most active. This could help to “sticky up” your blog as well.

1) Use Smart Titles

Give the SEs (and your visitors) a better indication of what your pages are about by succinctly displaying your page and post titles. Within the TITLE tag add this snippet to the header.php file to generate a dynamic title for each and every one of your fabulous pages:

< ?php if (is_single() || is_page() || is_archive()) { wp_title('',true); } else { bloginfo('name');
echo(' — '); bloginfo('description'); } ? >

You may want to give some thought to the actual wording of your post titles as well. Search engines give weight to titles just like people do (more or less). They just use logic rather than emotion. I’m not suggesting you should write titles for the engines, but a thoughtfully crafted title containing a keyword which also shows up in your post is going to rank better.

2) Don’t Ignore Your Meta Data

Meta data is not only fun to say – it’s extremely useful in allowing search engines and people to identify your site. Found within the HEAD tag, it’s basically a synopsis of your site and usually includes keywords, a site description and sometimes author info. SEs look for this data when indexing a site. It’s worth your time to include appropriate meta info. If you’re running a WordPress driven site, get this auto meta plugin to do the dirty work for you.

3) Make A Map

Help the engines crawl your site more effectively – by including a sitemap. Doesn’t really matter whether you create one of your own, or use a plugin which creates an xml version for you. Just git ‘er done. Because SEs typically discover pages from internal links, the benefits of having a sitemap are obvious.

4) Offer a Tip

Be a good little blogger, and add tooltips to your links and images. Not only will the search engine gods smile upon you, your visitors may too! Examples for entering a tooltip:

• For images: alt=”descriptive text”
• For links: title=”descriptive text”

5) Ping Your Posts

The most well-known blogs make a point of pinging new content, which is to say they alert the blog search engines about updates. Some examples include Technorati and IceRocket, though there are tons more. It may sound daunting, but it can be done via automation using WordPress’ update service. Simply get the ping configuration for the blog monitoring sites you wish to notify, and enter each one into the update box of your Options panel within the WP admin.

Note: although this articles was written with WordPress in mind, many of the ideas presented here can be applied to any blog, regardless of what software you’re using to run it.