What Aspects Of A Blog Have The Greatest Impact On Search?

Survey most blogs and you will find the same kinds of design elements: logo – banner art – main navigation – right-column and/or left-column navigation – call-out areas – contact info – images and captions – content blocks – sitemaps – comments – footer info. Because these elements are so prevalent, they’re often adopted and/or visually transformed without really understanding how blogs work or how to make blogs work better.

Anyone who has landed on a blog knows that the most recent post is the first one you see at the top of the page. Older blog posts are found below the newest post and on the following pages. Most blogs force the visitor to experiment with menu offerings to find what they want or rely on search features within the blog itself. In order to optimize the design and the experience of the blog for visitors and for search, a designer must ask: What do the search engines see on a blog and how do they assign value?

Search engine optimization practitioners generally agree that when a new post lands on the blog’s home page, that post’s value for search is at its highest point. Because of the way search engines index each page with their robotic algorithms, as each new post lands and pushes the older posts down the page, the older posts have less and less value. Most SEOs think that, as a post pushes off the home page and into archives, eventually the search value all but disappears. This makes the SEO attributes of a blog and of each individual blog post all important.

A simple way to counteract the decreasing SEO value would be to increase the overall page volume of the blog by adding content. There can be no doubt that this helps a blog attain critical mass and keeps it fresh. But adding content without developing an SEO-friendly strategy based on keywords and keyphrases will never produce the results most of us want from our blogs.

Keywords and keyphrases are the structure on which everything else is predicated – from search-friendly post titles and matching URLs, to permalinks, to the naming of categories and tags, to the search-friendly blog content, and should even extend to paid search, landing page development, and, further, to social media campaigns. Strategizing for search is really surveying how visitors understand your key topics linguistically and then framing the site’s design and content around these terms. This is done by researching user’s search patterns on the web. By testing what search engines return for results on important terms and modeling competitors and like-organizations, determinations can be made for mapping these your terms across the whole website.

So now the question is; what aspects of blogs should designers (and developers) focus on to insure the greatest impact on search engine-friendliness, now and in the future? For a list of must-haves for blogs from a search engine perspective, go to the designforseo blog post entitled, 18 SEO-Friendly Blog Tactics For Designers. Don’t hesitate to join the discussion if you have something salient to add.

Tangled Vines: Does Your Web Content Feel Like This To You?

In her wonderful book, Content Strategy for the Web, Kristina Halvorson’s first contention in the pursuit of better interactive content and better decision-making about online content is to ascertain what content you already have, to adopt a clear strategy about how to evaluate the content, and to get serious about clearing out the “dead wood” in the content you’ve already published. I’ve been saying this for years. Content must come first because your site only serves two purposes – put quite succinctly by Halvorson on page 6:

Generally speaking, your web content is useless unless it does one or both of the following:

• Supports a key business objective.
• Supports a user (or customer) in completing a task.

This is a mandate that not only content strategists and interactive copywriters should follow, but interactive designers as well. Web designers consistently make the fatal error of designing sites that brand or re-brand an interactive presence visually without clearly understanding or incorporating the core needs of the client. As a result, the client is often stuck with interactive designs that are not scalable, hold key elements of the client’s information stream invisible, or require elaborate and/or costly redesign and redevelopment to meet the future needs of the client.