I was approached by Mohammed from msafi.com and he thought that this article he wrote might be of use to readers of this blog. I agreed with him and decided to republish it here. You can find the original publication here
Most people just accept the default, out-of-box layout of blogs even though they know it is not optimal for the nature of their blog. I’m not the first to say that blog navigation is a nightmare.
Why is that?
The main problem with blog navigation is that the content is not interlinked properly. That’s especially true for generic blogs that aren’t about one single topic.
When a visitor lands on your generic blog, they’re probably interested in only one of the topics that you cover. Say that topic is dogs. Even though all of your dog posts are grouped by “tags” and “categories”, your blog sidebar is probably distracting the visitor with links to other unrelated content about cycling, rock climbing or whatever else you write about.
Don’t distract your readers.
Give your readers only what they’re interested in at that moment and help them find more of it. Doing that will make your visitors stick around longer, browse more pages, and even improve your SEO!
Here’s how you can achieve that.
Clean Up Your Sidebars
On your post pages, you don’t have to tell the reader about all the categories and tags that you write about. Why would you clutter your sidebar with such information?
A list of categories and a tag cloud are useful information on the homepage because they give your reader an overview of the things that you write about. So, you can put those on the sidebar of the homepage, but not the sidebar of posts pages.
The problem is that most WordPress themes don’t separate the site-wide sidebar from the post sidebar. It is, however, essential to have a separate sidebar for posts if you’re serious about improving the navigation and layout of your blog. If your theme has a single sidebar for everything, read this post to learn how to give your posts their own sidebar.
Ideas for Relevant Content to Put on Your Posts Sidebar
The more a Web page is focused on a single topic and the more links to other related Web pages it has, the more search engine optimization weight it’ll carry for that topic. Making your sidebar relevant to the topic of the post itself will have huge benefits for your blog. Here are some ideas of the relevant content put on your sidebar:
- Related links to other posts on the same topic on your blog
- A list of categories that the post belongs to
- A list of tags that the post belongs to
- RSS feed for the categories and tags that the post belongs to
Use a Related Posts Plugin
Perhaps the best thing you could do to improve the navigation of your blog is to use a related posts plugin. The most popular plugin for this function is Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP).
Read this post to learn how you can put links to related posts on your sidebar using YARPP.
I hope you found these tips helpful. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions on what else can be done to improve navigation, post them below!
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Hi Rob – Thanks for publishing my article