I recently started blogging a few months ago from a background in SEO and it’s always fascinating to see and read blogs which talk about SEO and general blogging. Someone once said that the home page of a website/blog is like a real estate; a very rich real estate and SEO has a lot to do with making the best out of that real estate.
Today I’m going to share with you some of my favourite tips to help your real estate and structure your blog better. In the long run this article should help with SEO for your blog and also reduce your bounce rate if done right.
Put Your Best foot forward
One of the first things I’ve noticed about some blogs is they don’t give brief summaries for their posts. I’ve thought about this and tried to see if there was any advantage towards having the full article published on your home page, as opposed to say, the first paragraph, with maybe a catchy image. I’ll love for some who knows of an advantage to let me know, but in the mean time, I’ll talk about why it is a disadvantage from an SEO and User Experience POV. When you publish the complete 500-800 words on your front page:
- What’s left for your older posts? Especially if they’re long posts?
- That means you’re going to end up having a pretty long home page. Not very cool.
- Your users are going to have to scroll for a pretty long time to get to the next post, and the next and the next… They might just get tired and leave.
- Most likely in each post you’ll have a number of links. This doesn’t take into consideration your header links, side links and your footer links. When we add all the links together you will have lots of links on the first page, making it harder for the crawler to go through and index relevant inner pages.
Attractive Home page
Your home page should be attractive, you don’t want to scare a newbie away from your website with extremely long posts. Lure them in with short but appealing summaries which make them click on the full article. Sometimes the first post might not be for them, then they can have another quick summary of your other posts. Some websites put a couple of their most recent posts on their home page then include the most popular posts on the home page. You’r most popular post could be the ones with the highest interaction (comments) or highest view, which ever you prefer.
Learn how to Categorize
If you’re homepage is actually a landing page that means it’s like a gateway, right? A gateway into your website. Now this might explain why you want to put all your content on the first page but you just might end up scaring everyone away if you do that. However, if you categorize your content right, with proper tagging and labeling you don’t have to worry too much about putting everything up on the front page. Proper categorizing helps to put the best foot forward and ensure you only put up the most relevant posts on your home page. It will save people leaving your blog in frustration when they’re looking for something specifically. If it’s categorized right then it’s just like a well organised library…
What are yours?
These are some of my favorite SEO tips for structuring a site. What are yours? Do you put your full content up on home page? The good thing about SEO is once you know the basics everything else is down to opinion and trials. Has it been more beneficial for you to put up your full content on your homepage or not? Please lets know your thoughts 🙂
Image credit: All in a raw