How To Improve The Findability Of Your Best Content
As a blogger or Web Master you want visitors to see your best content. If they see your best content, they are more likely to like what they see and come back. So it makes sense for you to promote your best, and most successful content.
How can you Promote your best content?
My favorite is Skellie’s small graphic images. SEO book has top content for the week, but an article I read in the November issue of .Net magazine was actually quit critical of findability issues of Aaron Walls fantastic blog, stating that most of the best content was hidden in the archives. Chris Garrett promotes his top content with a popular article section in the side bar which is very common and can be archived by using the Blogroll feature of WordPress to promote selected articles. Darren has a fantastic method of showing the best content on Problogger, with popular content even broken into subheading tabs.
What About the Rest of your Content?
It is also important that visitors can find what they are looking for. Think to yourself, if I was looking for information on “insert keyword”, how hard would it be for me to find the best and most relevant content? There are a few ways to increase the findability of your content. An enhanced site search box from Google or Yahoo is an option, I also like the use of very granular categories, and tag clouds. Make sure your categories are well defined, and It’s not a good idea to use multiple categories for a single post as it creates duplicate content on your site, so try not to overlap posts into multiple categories often. Something I need to work on with Pingable is how results for search’s, tags or categories are displayed. Using excerpts enables you to display more results on a page for easy scanning. Tag Clouds seem to be very common place in Web 2.0 environments, and even if you aren’t fan of their appearance, they are great for improving the findability of mini categories or keywords.
Tags: Findability
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Comments (13)
I have found Darren’s site to be well organized, as his information for beginners is easy to access. I also like the small pictures idea -I would like to incorporate this in my future efforts.
As for tag clouds, I’m very hesitant to use them because of their appearance. Have you found them useful on your web sites?
Looking at my stats people use them, and for terms I wouldn’t expect too. The current cloud is a little ugly though.
Nice article. I also think that Skellie’s banners are the best way to go if you just want to highlight your content but you have to take into account the added page weight and also, not everyone is comfortable enough with a graphics program to do that kind of thing easily and more importantly, well.
Jacob
Owww…. The idea of small pictures are refreshing but a little bit heavy. It will delay my page for 0.5 seconds. But the idea is unique… sadly someone already use it.
I will definitely find another idea!
Cool dear.. and a thanks for reminding me to check these sites.!
nice article. thanx for the information. its really worth.
Tag clouds are great too, as you suggest. Also inserting a simple search engine is important. There are quite a few wordpress plugins for the purposes.
Thanks, that must have taken a loads of work to put that together. This is a great summary.
Use Google Adsense to start earning money with your blog, but gradually as your traffic increases, keep adding more and more money making programs to your site.