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.

a version of LLBean's extensive site map

Stumbling upon a discussion about Site Map Design Best Practices on IxDA.org’s website, I was encouraged to find Jared Spool’s comments about site maps, user experience and search. Here are the highlights:

• People don’t want site maps – they use site maps when the website have poorly-designed navigation and bad user experience.
• Site map users are really making last-ditch efforts to find what they want.
• Analyzing site map traffic tells you what really isn’t working in your navigation NOT how to make the site map better.
• Really understanding web standards and web accessibility is more beneficial than plunking a site map down and calling it a day.
• Site maps are not SEO – if the website has a well though-out strategy, efficient architecture, proper coding, great content and linking structures, site maps won’t add anything.
• Site maps ARE needed for poorly-designed websites – there is benefit to adding one in this case.

You can read more about why Jared Spool thinks site maps are a design cop-out and some nice case studies by clicking the link above. The biggest point he makes (and I agree) is this, “Users don’t want site maps.” And they don’t. They want engaging experiences. They want tons of great content they can count on from authors they trust. They want easy-to-use architecture and intuitive organization.

They don’t want site maps.