How to optimize your blog to get maximum visitors (increase traffic)

If your are a newbie to blogging, or a failed blogger, it is time to think different. It is time to take a look at your layout, SEO etc. Check your stats. Check if the most of the visitors are from search engines, Social networking or RSS feeds. If the no. of reference from direct link of your website (eg: bloggingbytes.blogspot.com) is very less, that mean you are failed to impress your viewers or you missed something.

Here I give you few essentials tips to make your page optimally user-friendly. Follow them closely, implement them and see the popularity of your site soaring high.

Title : Give your post a good title. It is one of the main things you have to be careful. It should not be so short or so lengthy. Search engines mostly neglets very long titles ( I don't know the exact limit). It discourages the readers too. Also don't use too small title. It must convey the idea. A perfect title should say what is the content of the post. From the title, the readers understand that whether it is suitable for them> It should be attractive, short and also it have proper SEO. Add proper keywords to the title. It helps the search engines and the visitors too. Using best keywords can target advertisers too. If you have Google adsense, good title will serve nice and high paying ads- means more earnings!

Font Size and Line Spacing : Use moderate font sizes- neither big nor small. Don't make the reader squint their eyes to read your content. 1em is considered the perfect size for a comfortable reading. Add or subtract .1 or .2 em as per your linking, but don't make it too tiny or too large. Just like font size, line spacing is also an important property. It's set by the CSS property line-height. As the name itself makes it clear, without line spacing, all the text lines look crammed. Use line-height: 1.5em

or some other value that suits you.

Time Stamp : The best place to show the time stamp, i.e., when the post was written, is just after the post title. Don't make the visitor shuttle between top and bottom of the post just to check when it was posted. A visitors needs to know the currency of the post before reading it, not after finishing it. Check one such ideal use in pic below.

Image margin : The most important constitute of styling of your blog template. There should be some empty space all around the images of your post. Give your images some breathing space. Check image on right. Have at least 5 Px space between your images and text. This property can be set using

.img {

margin: 5px

}

code in the post-image class in your style sheet or you can use it as follows -

<img src="image.jpg" style="margin: 5px" >

for individual images.

Use blockquote & Pullquote : Whenever you are quoting someone or some other source, use block quote. To instantly draw the attention of the visitor to a particular important part of the post, use Pullquote. Their implementations are explained in code section below.

Given below is the ideal pieces of code to implement above tips. Change the integer values as per your liking and check the effects. You need to place these codes appropriately in your stylesheet or between opening <style> and closing </style> tag of your site template.

body {

font: 1em 'Lucide Grande', Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif;

line-height: 1.5em;

}

.img {

margin: 5px;

padding: 3px;

}

.pre {

background: url('blockquote.gif') no-repeat top left;

margin-left: 3.9em;

color: #8f8f8f;

width: 80%;

}

.pullquote {

padding: 10px;

width: 200px;

float:right;

margin:10px 0 10px 10px;

border-top:2px solid #694e1c;

border-bottom:2px solid #694e1c;

text-align: center;

line-height: 22px;

font-family: georgia, verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

font-variant: small-caps;

color:#ccc;} /* Usage - h4 class="pullquote" */

Easy Comment Option : Commenting on the article should be easy. The more comments your post has got, the more popular and attractive it seems to the visitors. WordPress style commenting is the best. But blogspot bloggers doesn't have this feature. You can use this hack. Otherwise, the link for comment form should be placed in such a location that it could be found easily. Preferably, just at the end of the post.

Top Commentators : Another way to get your readers involved is to use a 'Top Commentators' widget on the sidebar. Everyone wants to be on 'Top 10', don't they. So, if you have such a widget, which will list 10 people as top readers / commentators, it'd seem like reward for the visitors. They will comment on your posts with more enthusiasm. Check this post for ways to install 'Top Commentator' widget. And if you're not a WordPress user, go for the recent comments widget as explained here.

Bookmark Options : This is one important way to get more visitors. Provide social bookmark links at the end of your post. [Check end of this post, for example] This will help other visitors to find your post and eventually visit it, leading to more traffic to your site. One very useful way of providing social bookmarking options is explained here. Alternatively, you can make use of Add This. It provides options for bookmarking your story to all major social bookmarking sites. Follow instructions there.

Related Post : At the end of post - use a widget like Related Post. The visitor has come to your site to read about some particular topic. And if you provide him with alternate links of related post, he'll surely visit some of them, in turn staying on your site for more time.

Top Articles : Sidebar is the best location to place a widget like "Top Viewed Posts" of your blog. This will prompt the visitor to visit your other posts, instead of leaving your site. You can manually build one such list of posts and place it on the sidebar. Or, there are some vendors who provide such widgets. Check Spotplex. Trust me, this is really a very useful widget.

Provide feeds easily : All these done and now the visitor is impressed with your blog. But if it takes him long to figure out how to subscribe to it or where to get the feed, he'll simply close the window. Place the site feed subscription options either at the top or bottom of the sidebar. I strongly oppose placing it in between. And, provide both Bookmarking and email subscription options. Use Feed burner as it provides a host useful services along with your feed. And use the standard RSS Feed icon instead of a text link as it will help visitors to easily locate it and understand its purpose.

That is enough for a good start. I hope these all helped you a lot. In additional to these, Keep applying SEO and see a steady increase in your traffic. Hope you enjoyed this article. Subscribe to our feeds to get latest updates in your Email Inbox.