5 in 5 : Five 5 Minute Tweaks that Will Make Your Blog Better
Got five minutes? Take five minutes to make your blog better, faster and more user friendly. Here are 5 things you can do in less that five minutes that will make your blog better instantly.
1. Add a Favicon To Your Blog
Not sure what a favicon is? You see them all the time and probably never knew they had a name.
Its that little icon that show up in favorites, address bar and tabs. Not having one could hurt you. Read Stoney deGeyter’s post, A Little Favicon Goes a Long, Long Way to find out how NOT having one can actually be hurting you.
Making and installing a favicon for you blog takes minutes.
How to create a favicon for your web site or blog.
2. Make Your Blog Load Faster
Install wp-cache Wordpress Plugin. This powerful plugin store your Wordpress pages as html and make load times WAY faster. Not only will this be a boon to your site visitors who will leave if a page takes too long to load but you may see an increase in your Adsense Revenue and CTR.After install you have to go to Wordpress—> reading—-> options and uncheck compress articles (gzip) if browsers ask for them and then go to Options—-> Wp-cache and check “enable”. You are ready to roll! You will notice an immediate difference in your page load time.
3. Personalize Your Site
Add a photo of yourself to sidebar or “about page” . if you don’t have a “professional” photo find one that is not too bad. Pick a photo where you are looking into the camera.
Humourous is okay, however I would re-think using a pic of you and your buddies doing tequila shots or choosing photo with anyone in a bathing suit on a professional blog . if you can’t find anything get someone to take a picture for you. A tight closeup is best. Try and look natural. Say “cheese”
4. De-Clutter
Hard code your pages and/or category pages. Use an html editor to grab the code or simply “view page source” and copy in notepad. Find your “pages” section. Copy the code into a text widget or put straight into your sidebar.php. . Take an extra few minutes and add nofollow tags to links that lead to pages that really don’t matter i.e disclaimer type or image maps. read more about why you should be hard coding your sidebars.
5. Best Foot Forward
Get your footer to do some of the heavy lifting for your blog and use it for more than sticking various tracking codes. Add anchor text using keywords to your footer. Chances are you all ready have copyright info in there- add an active link with some choice keywords. You can edit footer information in Presentation—->theme—->footer.php or in ftp edit.
All of these 5 minute tweaks for your blog are easy to do for bloggers of all skill levels and will leave you with a better blog- one that is faster, more search engine friendly and will give your visitors a better experience on your site.
Do you have any 5 minute tweaks to share? Lets here them and how they impacted your site.
Page load time is one of the reasons why I found this post. I was using stumbleupon and the page it was loading was taking too long. Being impatient, I clicked again and stumbled right into your helpful post. Thanks!
Mike’s last blog post..Cadillac Ad Offers the Worst Financial Advice
I agree with Mike.My blog loaded slow before I made a few changes to it and now I get more visitors and my sales are on the rise as well.I think this is the most important tweak you should do.
Tom At The Home Business Archive’s last blog post..About Commenting On Blogs