Performancing’s Blog Improvements

Performancing: Quick and Easy Blog Improvements

1. Put up a “Post not found” error 404 page – if someone tries to visit a broken link on your blog does the visitor get a nice friendly message or “error 404 file not found”? Even better for you, do you provide handy links to your top content, a search form and some adsense ads? It is surprising the difference just this small thing can make to your blogs usefulness and bottom line!
2. Offer more feed choices and a dummies guide for RSS novices – many of your visitors will not have a clue what RSS is or why it might be useful to them. If you give them a helping hand they will not only subscribe in greater numbers they might remember you favourably because of the nice thing you did for them.
3. Take off nofollow link condoms – I have never believed that nofollow did any good any way, blog spammers told the search engine reps it wouldn’t do any good and they were true to their word, but now it seems search engines index nofollow links and ignore the very solution they came up with. Thankfully the message is getting out that link condoms are bad, just say no to nofollow!
4. Show your most popular or best posts – a new visitor to your blog needs help in deciding if this is going to be a blog they want to return to. Show them your best and brightest content. There is code available for WordPress and it is really easy to do on Drupal using the statistics module, others will have plugins or you can hard code it into your template.
5. Provide comment feeds or email subscriptions – if you want really great discussion on a only semi-loyal trafficked blog you need to attract visitors who comment back. Many blog platforms have comment RSS which is a partial solution (see above) but I much prefer to use email subscriptions. There are solutions for WordPress and Drupal in the form of plugins.