Create Functional Footer For Your Blog

If you navigate through the various blogs available, you will realize that the vast majority of the blogs lack a footer. Even when they have one you will just find a copyright message there.

Most corporate or mainstream websites, on the other hand, do have a footer where you can find vital links for the site. As a result people are used to scrolling down to the footer whenever they have problems finding a particular information. This also help for an professional seo blog

A functional footer for a blog should have at least two links:

• a link to the homepage
• a link to the RSS feed

You can also consider adding the following:

• an email subscription box
• a link to the Archives
• a link to the “About” page
• a link to the “Contact” page
• the recent posts
• the popular posts

How to Grow A Blog - Blog Tips

Growing a blog to a successful state is a long journey that requires a great deal of effort and dedication. I believe there are four stages of growth that a blog must pass through in order to achieve this goal.and also helps in professional seo standards.These stages can be described as follows:

Stage 1: Getting Established

The first stage of growing a blog is simply getting established. The focus during this stage is primarily content and blog setup. Most of your effort will go into creating a sufficient quantity of quality content for a sustainable blog launch. I believe a good way to do this is to actually write anywhere from 10 to 50 articles prior to launching the blog.

Basic blog setup tasks like SEO and plugin setup is also a part of this stage, although this takes much less time than creating the actual content. You also want to make sure that you get a handful of backlinks simply so that your blog gets indexed by the search engines. I typically like to do this the natural way of getting a backlink and letting the search engine “naturally discover” your blog versus submitting your blog to be added to the search engine. I’ve noticed a more quality indexing of your content through this more natural process.

Most people fail in this initial stage by focusing on monetization. You’re not going to make any money in the early stages, so you may as well ignore it.

Time to complete stage 1: 3 – 6 months

Stage 2: Traffic Growth

You’re ready to enter the growth stage if you have an established blog with quality content. You’re starting to get a handful of comments and maybe even some regular readers. You’re also getting some traffic from search engines based on your indexed content.

The growth stage is marked by traffic growth, subscriber growth, and the start of some income produced by the blog. Even at this point, traffic growth is still more important than income growth so it is there where we will focus. The growth of traffic is created by continuous quality content plus the addition of quality backlinks.

The best ways to get the backlinks are not the easy ways. I think it is good to assume that Google is smarter than we think they are and know how to weigh hard-to-get backlinks versus easy-to-get backlinks. As such, I don’t place much emphasis on backlinks in comments, forums and social media. The better backlinks will come from guest posts and natural backlinks (when someone decides to link to your site because they like what you have to say). Establishing relationships with other bloggers can help develop backlinks, since building a relationship with someone will make him or her aware of your existence.

The backlinks serve two purposes. First, it actually drives traffic to your blog and hopefully, some of this traffic turns into regular visitors. Second, these backlinks help your search engine status which is crucial.

Make a goal for yourself to write two guest posts per month on quality blogs with established readerships and preferably solid Page Rank numbers. Of course, part of this process of getting guest posts on blogs is convincing the blog owner to publish your stuff and a link to your blog.

Stage 2 is a long process that can go on for months, even years. The growth will be slow, but the goal is for it to be consistent. Some blogs based on some helpful circumstances and maybe even a little luck will get through this stage rapidly, but for most of us, you’re looking at a longer process.

Time to complete stage 2: 6 months – 2 years

Stage 3: Maturity & Monetization

The maturity stage in most business cycles usually refers to a leveling off of growth. In blogging, maturity doesn’t necessarily mean the slowing of growth. In my opinion, it simply means that achieving the same growth rate doesn’t require as much effort. I repeat, this stage still represents significant growth in traffic.

Because this stage does not require the same level of effort in producing quality content for your blog as well as other blogs (guest posts), you should now put effort into refining the monetization of your blog. This can include signing advertisement deal, optimizing Adsense performance and possibly trying out some affiliate programs. With that said, quality content still must be continuously produced during this stage.

In addition to continued growth in traffic during this stage, you should definitely see significant growth in income. It is during this stage, that you can begin enjoying some of the fruits of your hard work of the previous months and years.

Time to complete stage 3: 6 months – 1 year

Stage 4: Maintenance

This stage is very interesting because there are several big blogs that do very well that have let their blogs deteriorate with regards to quality and perhaps quantity of content. The reason for this is usually because they no longer have to produce the same quality of content in order to continue growing and driving significant income. Could they grow even more and make even more money if they didn’t let their quality slip? Probably, but it is probably a natural tendency of bloggers at this stage.

With that said, not everyone falls into that trap, but the point is that the level of effort required to maintain a blog that has successfully reached this stage is significantly less than the effort required during the previous stages. Once blogs reach this level, it has almost reached a self-sustaining point where the readers continue to grow and spread the word without your encouragement to do so. Content is still required but it is not nearly as important as it was in previous growth stages.

In this stage, there is significant income potential. Possibly career replacing income potential. Most blogs don’t reach this level. In fact, it’s probably a tiny percentage of the blogosphere.

Note : Time frame stated above depends upon the quality of content and blog page indexing.

Tips To Get Through The Stages

1. Blog about a topic that you are either really interested in or are already involved in professionally. This will help you continue to produce content when it becomes difficult to continue to do so.

2. Approach growing your blog like growing a business. It takes time and requires work. There are few short cuts.

3. Understand ahead of time that growth will take time, and you are likely to become discouraged at times. Be persistent.

Basic Characteristics Of User-Friendly Websites

What makes a website user-friendly? There are probably an endless number of factors, but let’s look at these major characteristics according to professional seo point of view...

1. Page Load Speed

Although high-speed internet connections are becoming more and more common, there is still a large number of internet users that are on slower dial-up connections. Even with high-speed connections some pages just don’t load very quickly. Most of your visitors will be fairly impatient and pages that load slowly could chase them away. At the very least, slow loading times will reduce the number of pages that they’ll visit on your site.

Knowing your site’s audience can really help to know how your pages should be designed. A program like Google Analytics will show you the percentage of your visitors that are using different internet connections. Based on the numbers you can get a good idea of what type of impact page load speed will have on your overall audience. If your site attracts a high percentage of users with dial-up connections, you should be sure to keep pages loading as quickly as possible. If a very high percentage of visitors are using high-speed connections, you may be able to add a few extra elements to your pages.

Factors that influence the load times of pages include the number and size of images, extra items like flash, the amount of excess code (example, designing with a table-based layout instead of CSS), and the size of your pages. (Read more about website optimization).

2. Accessibility

If someone can’t use or access your website it serves no purpose for that visitor. Accessibility of websites has become a bigger priority for designers and developers in recent years, but there is still a long way to go. Even major corporations have struggled to achieve complete accessibility. Target was even sued over the accessibility of its website for handicapped individuals.

Some of the easiest things that you can do to improve the accessibility of your site include using alt tags for all images, use valid HTML and CSS coding, avoid frames, and allow text to be re-sized by visitors. There is of course much more to accessibility, which was covered in detail by 456 Berea St.

3. Navigation

All users want to be able to move through the website to find what they want. A huge factor in being user-friendly is providing simple and intuitive navigation. Major areas of navigation should be located consistently on all pages. Using common elements that users expect to find, like About pages and Contact pages will help as most internet users have come to expect them and will look for them at times.

A general rule of thumb is that any page on your site should be reachable with 2 clicks from your home page. For larger sites this probably isn’t realistic, but offering a sitemap and/or a sitewide search can really help.

Another important factor with navigation is that user’s shouldn’t have to guess where they will end up if they click on a link. Regardless of whether the link is part of a navigation menu, or if it is simply in the body of the text, visitors should understand where the link will lead them.

4. Information

Visitors are coming to your site for a reason. Whatever that reason may be, you want to provide them with what they are seeking. Are they coming to find basic information on your business’ services? Are they coming to read in-depth articles on a particular subject? Whatever the case may be, the information that your website provides needs to sufficiently meet the expectations of visitors.

A blog like this one will need to provide its readers with great, insightful articles in order satisfy its visitors. The website of a restaurant may need to provide hours of operation and a menu in order satisfy its visitors. Obviously, each situation is different. In order to have a user-friendly website you need to anticipate what visitors will expect to find at your site, and then put it right in front of them.