Here are 10 tips to improve your blog, I already did it on my blog in the last few weeks and now sharing it. Although these tips are used in my Blogger account that is based on the new Layout design, many of them are applicable to any other blog or website. Here are the tips:
1- Use Google Analytics
Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found your website and how they interact with it. This heps you improve your blog to attract more visitors.
To start, visit http://www.google.com/analytics/, login or register a new account (if you have not ), then add your website. Google Analytics will generate code that you should paste into all your website pages. You can paste it in a header file that is included in all your pages. Once this code is inplace, Google Analytics will start immediately collecting information, wait a day or so and see a wonderful analysis to your website.
2- Use Google Webmaster
You know that many visitors come from search engines, especially Google, if you want to see interesting information about how Google crawls and indexes your website. as example:
- The keywords that give you high rank in search results
- Indexed pages in your site
- Pages that links to your site
- Any errors in your website
- Crawl rate
To start, create a Google account if you don’t have one already, then verify your ownership to the site through adding a code that is generated by Google to your home page – or any other page -, then wait a couple of days and see that interesting information .
3- Submit your Feed to Google Webmaster
When I used Google Webmaster, I found many pages are missing, Google Webmaster suggest to add your SiteMap. I have the option to submit RSS Feed as a sitemap, of course Feed URL is easy for me as it is generated automatically by my Blogger account. After I added the Feed, I found that Google is able to index almost all of my pages, this of course will generate more visitors to my website.
4- Send Email Notifications of Posts to Your Friends
Most probably you already subscribed to many groups, such as old company friends, you faculty friends, and so on. Carefully select specific posts that match one of those group interest and email it as a link. They will be looking at your Blog and will know about it.
5- Subscribe By Email
You can give visitors the option to receive your blog posts by email. This requires some effort. You have first to subscribe to http://www.feedblitz.com/, feedblitz will ask you about your RSS feed and show you HTML code to use it in your blog. To use it in your Blogger account, add a new page element “HTML/JavaScript”, and copy/paste the code of feedblitz to it.
6- Show up your feed icon:
Your Blog Feed is important, but in my template the link of it is at the end of page and is missing the distinguishable orange icon. I get the icon form the Google Images, and in my blogspot account, I added new Page Element “HTML/JavaScript” at the top of my side bar (navigation boxes), and add the HTML code to it.
Note: I am using the new Layout design of Blogger.com
7- Properly Label Your Posts:
Over time you will have many posts, the old posts are hidden as Blogger will archive them into the Archive section. By utilizing labels, you are categorizing all your posts so that your visitors can look at older posts in specific category.
In new posts it is easy to label it. But if you have many old posts that need labeling/relabeling, the task of editing each post and label it is annoying. Happily we have a faster way by using Blogger Edit Posts feature, you can easily tag many posts at the same time.
8- Create Navigation Boxes
Select the most important posts in your blog and create a list of links, this will attract visitors to look at more posts. This is easily done by Blogger by adding a new page element named “Link List”.
9- Set Your Blog Feed to Short
When people subscribe to your feed via Feed readers, they receive the entire post in the email. This will not reflect in Google Analytics. By setting your Blogger to send only Short Blog Feed, the subscriber will receive the title and URL, when he click on it he will receive your entire post page inside his feed reader.
10- Show Posts as a Summery
I like to post long articles, at least several pages, and like to make my home page short. To let it shorter, I changed blog setting to show only 10 posts per page. Scrolling posts is still annoying. I researched about showing a summery and “Read Full Post” link, if the reader want to read the article he will click at the link and see the full article.
Blogger help in this regard, but you have to edit the template. This requires you to be advanced user if not a web developer and the changes are risky. To minimize risk, don’t try this in your blog, just create another test blog, play with it. After getting real experience just do the same in your blog, but be very careful to backup your old template to fallback in case things go wrong.
First familiarize yourself with the template and Layout features in Blogger, read this page http://help.blogger.com/bin/topic.py?topic=10274, and look at your template and try to get sense of the code.
Second, read the following post http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42215, it describe in detail how to change the template, but the article have fatal mistake that could waste you hours of frustration. The wrong line is in red and the correct code is in green.
Wrong Code:
<b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType != “item”‘><br />
<a href=”<data:post.url/>“>Read more!</a>
</b:if>
Right Code:
<b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType != “item”‘><br />
<a expr:href=“data:post.url”>Read more!</a>
</b:if>
Conclusion
There exist many ideas to improve your blog and you website, I hope the ideas presented here to be useful and encourage everyone to blog more 🙂