Is Your Blog Reader Friendly?

Aug 01 2008

Published by Dany at 9:30 am under Blogging

Can Your Readers Find What They Need?

Several of my favorite blogs and web sites make use of videos and podcasts. These webinars and teleconferences sometimes last an hour or more. There is a wealth of valuable information – but how can I find it again after the initial viewing?

Google doesn’t search inside a video or recording. If the blog owner doesn’t post a good description of the webinar’s content, I may never be able to locate the archived version. And even if I do find a webcast I watched last month, it probably won’t be indexed. Very few webmasters or blog owners take the time to post a list of important points with their corresponding time markers. Scrubbing through a one hour talk to find a few minutes of content is an almost impossible task. Yet who wants to sit and listen to the entire one hour presentation from start to finish again?

When a viewer turns to Google for answers, after they came to your site or blog, they will almost always be led to a different site or blog. It’s an iron law of the internet: if you fail or confuse your readers, they will look elsewhere.

Not Just A Video Problem

To a lesser extent, site navigation on most blogs is harder than it needs to be. Posts are archived by date, which is meaningful only to machines. If I knew what day and month a piece of information appeared, I’d probably remember the information itself.

Many WordPress blogs still use the default “?p=123″ style name for individual posts. Again – meaningful to a machine, worthless to a human reader. Not only will a good title with keywords help your SEO, it will help your readers. Fix those permalinks.

Tag clouds are a bugaboo of mine. I find them visually ugly and – even worse – hard to navigate. When I am searching for information, I do not care if 60% of the entire universe is interested in a different topic. I want to be able to quickly locate the information that I want to read about. Randomly sized words smeared haphazardly across a sidebar make a quick visual scan impossible. Ordered lists may not be sexy, but they work.

Think Like A Reader

If your blog offers information – no matter whether it is written or recorded – think like your audience when designing your site navigation tools. Try to use words readers will search for early in your posts. Use descriptive titles. Add some sort of time line highlight description (in writing!) to your long videos.

Make Navigation Easy

Pretend you are an average reader. You know very little about your blog except that there was a great post about SubJect X sometime last fall. Try to find it. Don’t cheat. Be a newbie. Do you have a search box? Is it easy to locate? Does it work? Are posts that have scrolled off the first page lost forever if you don’t own the secret decoder ring? Do your archives help? Are the categories meaningful? Have you used breadcrumbs and other aides to help readers find their way back to a post? Did you find what you needed or did you get frustrated and give up?

You don’t want readers to spend their time in fruitless searches. Keep readers on your site by making your amazing content easy to find.

Information Sells