Enbeeone3 : A Freelancer

Top 5 Tips to Improve Navigation in Your Blog

by enbeeone3 on 14/01/10 at 1:37 pm

A blog which is accessible and very user friendly can rake in tons of traffic. People would love to revisit a blog which offers much ease when they are reading through the posts or just browsing a blog site.

Navigation is a big thing to consider when you are trying to improve your blog site. You will loose traffic if your visitors could not find there way and around your blog. Give your readers a favor and try to help them navigate your site through this 5 easy tips:

Tip#1: Breadcrumbs can help your readers find there way. These breadcrumbs are very important in helping your visitors in navigating from one page to the other when browsing your site.

Below is an example of a breadcrumb:

Home>Category>Title of the Post = Home> Parenting> Top Tips to Help Put Your Baby to Sleep

These breadcrumbs show the path by which the reader has reached the current page he is visiting. The links could help them find posts in the future. You can help your readers find there way into deeper categories and areas of your site.

Tip#2:Always provide the page numbers for the category navigation. Just think of this, you are scanning through a blog with loads full of posts related to SEO (search engine optimization). These posts are all piled up under the “SEO” category. There are only 5 posts on display and you want to read the very first post done for this category, but there is no option to access it.

If you are working with a Wordpress blog, it can be a painstaking approach to navigate through the pages of the contents when you are looking for the previous or next links. Perhaps, you could try using the data-based navigation given you knew the date of the very first post on a specific category.

Tip#3: Next links for post navigations must be included. This can help your readers navigate your site with much ease. Your visitors will find it very useful especially when they are looking for the next post in a specific category. The ease of finding the next post by just clicking a link to another post can make your readers stick to your site. The longer the visitors read through your blogs, the better chances of getting probable clients to make a purchase of your products and avail of services. If you are working with Wordpress, check out the Next and Previous Links guide. It will give you more practical tips regarding effective navigation of your site.

Tip#4: Your blog site will be more user friendly if you have comment jump links. A “comments” link can be very useful especially when you are dealing with a lot of posts and if you want to keep track of all the comments made by other visitors. It can provide easy access to your readers to see how people think of your site and if there are any discussions going on. A lot of readers would prefer blogs with direct links to the comments.

Tip#5: Always remember to get rid of the default links in your blog. Wordpress blogs works like this, it starts off with a number of “Meta” links which should be removed by bloggers. Always seek to bookmark the admin link. If you are administering a group blog, there is no need to bookmark it.