How to optimize your Blog Page to attract readers?

When a blogger launches their blog, they want others to read it. Well most of times they want others to read it, and comment. But in the beginning, they have trouble because they are not popular enough, but when the blogs are there for a long time and still no readers that means the user is doing something wrong. In this Post I will be pointing out a few things that a blogger can do to optimize their blog page to attract readers.

In my last post, I showed you guys how you can display latest blog posts on a custom page in wordpress using the Raw Code Method. Now I had a number there to show how many posts you want to display. But sometimes people don’t know how many posts to display on their blog page. So that will bring me to my first point.

Pick The Number of Posts you want to display on Your Blog Page?

There are alot of things that plays a factor in making this decision, so I will go in one by one, so you can see the reasoning behind the answer.

You Don’t Want the Page to be Crowded.

You Don’t Want the Page to be very very long.

So What do you do in that case? Well you have to evaluate what type of content you will be posting. Will you be posting alot of images, Videos? Will you have very lengthy posts?

I have heard many solutions to this sort of problem. Some people will say that just display excerpts, and use auto-summary to 100 words, and you can display 10 – 15 posts on one page. I don’t think that is good enough.

Here is the technique I used to answer that question:

Use the excerpt code to display content on your blog page. The code looks something like this: <?php the_excerpt(); ?>

Then when I see that I will have a very long post like a tutorial, How to Increase Alexa Rank of your Website then I will write an entire post, and copy the first 3 or 4 paragraphs in the excerpt section of the wordpress write post area.

You will have to go Write > Post (Look for Advanced Options toward the bottom and it will have excerpt).

Now that way you will increase your page views because on your post it will have a link to add read more in the full post, and users will have to open another post. But they will only open the new page if they want to read it.

From my experience, readers don’t want to see alot of text all together, so now you have two options. Either put alot of text and have them run away suddenly, or you can show them little text, so the page is less crowded, and they might be interested in going to the next page. This way the reader stays on your blog for longer.

Second thing you want to concentrate on is making the page size small, so it won’t take alot of load time. So you will also use the excerpt thing on the long posts that contains alot of images and videos.

But if you don’t have alot of images and videos, and you don’t have a lengthy post, then you should just copy and paste the entire post on the excerpt, so it will display the entire post on the blog page. For me this combo have been working well.

I am displaying 5 posts on my Blog Page, and sometimes I put full posts if they are short, and if they are long, I will use the excerpt setting.

Now that you have seen how many posts you should put on your blog page, we can go to the next step and that is How does your blog page look.

Look plays an important factor, but sometimes the design of a site looks good, but the owner ruins the look. The best example I can give you is John Chow.com. John have a really nice design, but he ruined it by making it too crowded with ads. First thing his ads does is it makes the load time slower. Specially Kontera, not to mention he have that annoying tab at the top which scrolls down as you scroll down. Then he have a js running the peelaway. Then he have the 125 x 125 ads. Then he have a web banner, text links, a banner in the first post. Now that gets pretty darn annoying as a reader. If you noticed, I used to be a top commentator always on John’s website, but not anymore. Now I go there sometimes and write a few comments because it gets me traffic. Not necessarily that I admire his blog.

He makes a few extra bucks, but there is a difference between him and Darren of Problogger. That is a reason why John is only at 26k readers while Darren is almost doubling the readership.

Now I am not saying do not monetize your blogs, but don’t cross the boundary line. I can understand, that you have a web-banner, buttons 125 x 125, peel away, and ads in some posts… but then contextual links and more is just too much.

That is another thing you want to stay away from if you are looking to attract readers.

Third thing, you need to worry about is putting life and personality into your posts. Each blogger have their own style of doing that. Some would put videos, some goes with images, some use their own voice. I say why not do it all, and concentrate on the one that you are best at it, but don’t just ignore the rest.

Those are the top 3 things that you should consider when you are optimizing your blog page to attract readers.