Many businesses are turning to blogs as an extension of their marketing collateral. Blogs are a great way to provide insight to your audience, give them an easy way to get to know you and allow them to build a relationship with you so that you can achieve brand loyalty.
Some companies have very successful blogs. They produce the content their audience wants and they have an aesthetically pleasing design that makes their site easy to navigate.
On the other hand, there are some businesses that cannot find success with their blog. Most businesses assume that the content is to blame, but oftentimes, the problem lies in the design. The following are three common design mistakes that could end up killing your blog.
1. It’s too busy.
Though you may not think that it’s fun, a busy background and busy font can make people turn away the minute they land on your blog. Bright backgrounds with bright fonts can be hard for your audience to look at. Plus, if your background is too busy, they may not be able to focus on the content, which is the most important part of your blog.
Crazy fonts can also be hard for your audience to read. If you use something other than a simple font, your audience may have a hard time figuring out the words on your blog. And along with the font, you also want to make sure that the size of your font is not too small or too big.
2. The navigation is confusing.
You don’t want your readers to simply land on a blog post, read it and leave. You want them to land on a blog post, read it, and stick around for a while perusing past blog posts and possibly even getting back to your website. This is where simple navigation is essential. If your navigation is hard to find or hard to read, your audience is not going to stick around. Don’t be cute with titles for your navigation. If the navigation is leading to a page about your company, use “About Us” as a title. If your audience doesn’t understand where a link will take them, they’ll be hesitant to click on it.
You also want to make sure that your navigation is easy to find, such as along the top or along the left-hand side. This is how most websites are set up, and this is how most Internet users expect to see a site. While placing your navigation somewhere different shows that you’re unique, it can also frustrate your audience trying to find it.
3. Your audience can’t share your posts.
The more your blog content is shared, the more traffic you’ll receive. Thanks to social networks, sharing your blog content is easy, but if you don’t have share features on your blog, you’ll never see the virality that some blogs do. When a reader lands on a blog that interests them, they may be inclined to share it with their fans, friends and followers through social media. If you don’t have a share button, they’re not going to take the time to copy and paste the URL. Instead, they simply won’t share the info, which means that your blog posts aren’t reaching as wide of an audience as you possibly can.
Jacob Smith is a business owner and avid blogger. He created his own business blog and used the wordpress themes business layouts.
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How to Avoid the Google Sandbox in a New Blog
If you run a web site, which you want to be visible on the search engines, you should know about the Google sandbox and how to avoid it. The search engine giant, Google, implements measures to keep violators at bay.
What happens if you committed errors using Google’s applications and services? Well, if you incurred violations, Google may remove your web site from its search engine result pages. This is called deindexing. To find out if your web site is not indexed, visit Google and key in your web site domain in this pattern:site:yoururl.com
What Is Google Sandbox?
If you can see your web site moving from the first pages to the 10thpage or more of the SERPs, then, you are not yet deindexed. But
this is a possible sandbox effect. The sandbox is a place where web sites, especially the new ones, are placed until they have proven their worth in ranking. Sometimes, your web site is thrown into a sandbox if for an instance, your web site ranks for a certain keyword today, and gone from the ranking tomorrow.
What Causes Google Sandbox?
The sandbox happens if you have done something that agitates Google in matters such as SEO and backlinking. Common instances where inviting a sandbox is imminent are when you create myriads of backlinks to your web site in a very short time or create backlinks within poor quality content.
In a way, sandboxing a web site is a punishment done by Google by putting your web site down below the ranking where there is no traffic. But being in a sandbox is not permanent. It can last from a few days to a few months.
How to Avoid Google Sandbox?
Having diverse backlinks is important. If you use hundreds of backlinks by employing ScrapeBox or XRunner, then being sandboxed is very likely. New web sites are more vulnerable to being thrown in a sandbox than older web sites especially iftheir SEOis not well diversified.
For example, if you are running a new web site on diet, and have created two thousand backlinks in its first week of launching into the media buzz, you must ensure that those backlinks are from various sources like comments, articles, blog posts, forums, news releases, to mention a few. For Google, those backlinks could have been generated naturally.
How Should You Plan Your Backlinks?
One sure way to avert Google sandbox is to diversify your backlinks by creating them gradually over time. Rather than rushing in to create many backlinks in a short time, concentrate on creating several backlinks from different sources. While Bing and Yahoo give more value to quantity, Google is giving more weigh to quality of pagerank that each created backlink has.
So, the next time you begin with your SEO campaign for your weight loss web site, ensure that your backlinks are well diversified to avoid the penalty of being sandboxed.
Author:
Richie Richardson is passionate about SEO and SM. He occasionally writes on topics related to weight loss, Bistro MD diet and other diet programs like Medifast and Nutrisystem. Click here to know more about him and his blog. You can also follow him on Twitter @zarrylyms.
6 of the Best Guest Posting Tips
Guest posting can be a very lucrative venture for all parties involved. The owner of the blog is provided with free content, and the writer of the content is given acknowledgement of their wisdom on the chosen topic. In this aspect, guest posting seems to benefit both parties equally. However, it can be just as difficult to find high-quality blog owners who will allow guest posting, as it is to find high-quality writers to make guest appearances on your blog.
Keeping in mind a few helpful guest-posting tips can be beneficial for all involved and will help to produce the highest quality content that will reflect well on both the blog owner and the content creator.
Posting Tips for Guest Bloggers
- Aim High – Look for highly traveled blogs or those with impressive page rankings. These links will also be highly valuable portfolio material.
- Research the Blog – In order to create what is fresh content for the blog, you will need to know what content has already been created. If the blog is a lengthy one, check for tag clouds or keywords on the topics that are the same as your posting idea.
- Catchy Title – Catchier content. Be sure that you supply an eye catching title for your content, and make just as certain that the content lives up to the title. A good blogger knows that even the most boring topic can be made interesting with the right language.
- Give Your Best Stuff Away – This may be a hard concept to swallow for some bloggers but you want your guest posts on any blogs to be the most shining examples of your work. Not only will this garner the blog owner increased traffic or interest in their site, but it may also cause others to take notice, and perhaps even offer you paying gigs.
- Interact – Reply to commenters and pay attention to your re-tweeters. Get involved and make sure that you are available to ponder any issues about your blog posts with others who may be doing the same. Building a rapport with readers is valuable regardless of the blog posted on. Thanks to social media, people with similar interest or interest in you, can find you with a simple click once you have engaged them on site.
- Promote Your Posts – Promoting your own post is never more important than it is when posting on someone else’s site. Show them that their effort to give you a great link in exchange for great content has not gone unnoticed. Tweet, share, Digg, and do all you can to make sure the posts receives all of the coverage that is in your power to create.
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