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Recently, we talked about improving website usability by giving visitors what they want. Today, we’re going to take that one step further by discussing blog usability. Most bloggers don’t give usability a second thought. They crank out their posts and assume all is well with their blog.

The truth is a successful blog is much more than just great content. The best blogs deliver exactly what readers want and make it easy for them to find the information they need. Here are 5 simple tips for improving blog usability.

1. Add Related Posts Plugin—Ideally, you want readers to stay on your blog as long as possible. You want them to continue exploring your content so they become loyal readers. One way to do this is by using a related posts plugin. At the end of each post, this plugin will display a short list of other posts on your blog that cover related topics. It decides which posts are related based on the post titles, tags, categories, and other contextual clues.

2. Link Out to Other Useful Posts—Too many bloggers are afraid to link out to other blogs. They think they’ll either lose link juice or that there readers will never come back. I call BS on both claims. Linking out turns your blog into a resource. It shows readers that you give them access to all the information they need on a given subject.

3. Don’t Use Too Many Widgets—Widgets are designed to improve the usability of your blog, but when you have too many of them stuffed onto your blog, they become distracting and overwhelming. Take a step back and see if any of the widgets on your blog can be sacrificed.

4. Have Clear Headlines—Your readers are pressed for time. Before they’ll commit to reading a post, they want to know what it’s about. That’s where the headline comes in. The headline needs to be catchy enough to grab their attention but clear enough to let them easily understand what the post is about.

5. Use Good URL Structure—Rather than having a messy URL structure like this: www.yourblog.com/post-123?%$765!, you should use a clearer structure like this: www.yourblog.com/descriptive-post-title. Good URL structure is ideal for SEO purposes, sharing, bookmarking, and overall usability.

What are some of your best tips for improving blog usability? Add your own by leaving a comment.

Posted in:Blogging, WordPress

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10 Must Have SEO Plugins for WordPress

When the topic of blog promotion comes up, the conversation usually turns to using social media sites like Digg, ReddIt, and others to generate traffic. And rightly so. But it’s crucial not to overlook the importance of optimizing your posts for the search engines. Remember, the search engines love fresh content, so a little SEO can go a long way to getting your blog substantial organic traffic.

To make optimizing your blog easier, I’ve developed a list of 10 great SEO plugins for WordPress.

1. Platinum SEO – Platinum SEO is basically a more robust version of the All in One SEO Pack. It features all the same benefits, but it also has more options for no indexing of certain pages and redirection. This tool covers many of the SEO bases.

2. Meta Robots- Meta Robots makes it easy to tell the search engines will posts you want indexed and which you don’t. The array of options give you the most control over how the search spiders will crawl your pages.

3. SEO Smart Links- This tool makes interlinking fast and easy. It allows you to automatically link certain phrases back to certain posts every time you mention the phrase. It’s a hassle free way to make sure you’re linking back in a way that enhances your blog’s usability.

4. Google SEO Positioner- How can you know if your SEO efforts are paying off unless you keep track of your performance? This plugin tracks your ranking for certain keywords in Google. It’s a great way to see what keywords you need to focus on.

5. Google XML Sitemaps- This plugin provides the best way to ensure your new posts are crawled by the search engines quickly. Any time you edit or submit a new post, it essentially sends a message to the search engines letting them know it’s ready to be crawled.

6. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin- You want your visitors to continue browsing through your blog after reading a post. One of the best ways to do this is to use a related posts plugin. This plugin can be used to include a short list at the end of each post with links to other similar posts. It keeps your readers moving through your blog in an orderly fashion.

7. Broken Link Checker- If your blog is optimized, you’ll have search visitors landing on old posts from months earlier. You want to make sure everything in these posts is still working properly, including the links. The Broken Link Checker alerts you in the Dashboard anytime an outbound link is no longer working. It’s a great way to keep the user-experience at its highest.

8. No Self Pings - Internal linking is a crucial part of blogging. It keeps your visitors moving through your blog, and it adds to the user experience. Of course, it can be annoying getting notified each time you drop an internal link. The No Self Pings tool eliminates these notifications, only alerting you when you receive back links from other sites.

9. SEO Friendly Images- Images are an important part of blogging. They give your posts a unique flair, and they help break up the content. SEO Friendly Images does exactly what it says– it makes your blog images search engine friendly. The tool is easy to use, and it’ll save you a lot of time.

10. SEO Slugs – We’ve all seen the blog urls that seemingly go on with no end. The point of SEO slugs is to keep your urls short and free from words that don’t help you rank better. By removing stop words that Google ignores, your urls are shorter, and keyword-rich.