Nobody’s blog is perfect. If you don’t believe me, ask the hundreds of bloggers who took part in Darren Rowse’s 31 Days to Build A Better Blog project. Most people, whether they had been blogging for days or years, took away something they could use. But how do you improve your blog if you haven’t got someone leading you by the hand?  Remember that when you delve into your blog stats you can find out:

• what attracts visitors to your site (keywords or content titles)
• what makes them stay
• what makes them leave

You can use the information you get to make your blog more attractive to your target audience. Here are a few ways to do this.

Optimization

First of all, let’s look at the content you already have. if people are landing on a particular post when they search for something, check to see whether you can edit it to make it even more relevant to that search term. Do some keyword research to find out about related terms and see if you can drop a few of those into your post. These will make it even more relevant for both readers and search engines. Whatever you do, don’t stuff it with keywords. The idea is to tweak rather than rewrite.

Write Something New

Better yet, write a new post on the preferred keyword to make your blog even more relevant for the chosen term. I used this myself on my blog. I noticed that people were looking for help with writing portfolios and were finding a post I had written in 2006 or 2007. I looked at the comments in the post, checked the search terms and questions, and wrote a brand new post which answered those questions. That’s now one of the most popular posts on my blog.

Highlight Related Content

One way to keep people on your blog is to highlight content related to what they are looking at. If you blog with WordPress, there are a number of plugins that automatically display related content at the end of every post.

• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)
• Aizattos Related Posts (no longer supported, but still working on my WP 2.71)
• Similar Posts
• WordPress Related Posts
• Contextual Related Posts

If you blog on Blogger, then try these solutions.

Layout Tips

There are also a number of other options for keeping readers interested. Things to try include:

• Including sections in your header, sidebar or footer that show popular posts and most commented posts
• choosing a theme that has featured posts functionality built in
• adding images to every post

These should all help to create an attractive and appealing blog.

Sharon Hurley Hall
Get Paid To Write Online.com

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