Helping visitors browse your content, Part 1

May 29, 2007

Unless you started blogging very recently, the content of your blog won’t fit on your first page. In fact, most of your content will be scattered over several pages.

The key is to make your visitors find the information you’re presenting. There are several ways to make your visitors find information on your site.

• Let them search for it
• Show them links to related posts
• Link internally
• List your best posts
• Categorize your content
• Paginate your pages

Provide search

The library
In a library you can find a book by going to the specific section, and look at the titles of the books one by one, hoping your eyes will fall on that particular book. Even if you have seen that book on a shelf before, it might take some time to find that book. Imagine what happens when you look down 2 rows of shelves without finding what you’re looking for.

Thank heaven they decided to provide an alphabetical directory (either a large book, or a file cabinet with a lot of cards, stored alphabetically) of all the books in the library, so you can look the book up, look in which section, aisle, and on which shelf it is. Even better is that most modern day libraries provide this directory electronically. You just type in the title, author or some keyword, and voila, there is everything you need to know about your book.

Your blog is a library
If you expect a visitor to go through you blog page by page to find certain information, this visitor will not stay very long. Even if you provide some sort of table of contents (usually called archives), it can be like hell to go through all these archives to find what they’re looking for. And since web users are lazy, they will leave it at that and maybe never come back.

This is why most blogs offer a search option: the author knows that web users would rather type in a keyword they are looking for, then go through your archives. They will probably still have to go through the results, but this will have narrowed down the posts.

Make money with search

Yes, even your search option can be turned into a source of money. Google provides Adsense for Search. Don’t expect to make a fortune, but in my opinion, every penny you could add to your income, can help out. And if you can make some money with something people are bound to use, why not?

To add Google Adsense for Search to your blog, you need to have an Adsense account. If you don’t have an account yet, get one now.
More on installing Adsense for search later. Update: I wrote an article on Rehuel.com about adding Adsense search to your Wordpress blog.

In part 2 in this series I will be talking about related posts and internal linking.

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Posted in Blogging