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By Peter T. Rosenblum

This morning, and I mean really early morning, I went about my weekly perusal of about 50 or so SEO and SEM blogs.

“You have such great content, why is it so difficult to find? Biggest offenses in this area are: No archives, no categories, no tags and no site search.”

For the most part this is a very informative and satisfying experience. However, there are a few barriers to blog reader experience that I feel especially obligated to point out.
The following observations are relevant for any business blog:

• Don’t make readers register or login to make a comment. What, you’re too lazy to manage all the comment spam? Or install a better spam filter? You’re lucky to get people to your blog in the first place. Why make it inconvenient to interact?
• Please don’t publish content in PDF of MS Word format that would be just as fine as a web page. I hear you saying, what? Yes, there are a few blogs out there that post using a blog content management system, but publish longer articles, white papers, etc in other formats. At least warn readers before they click on the link.
• Why oh why must so many blogs make it difficult to subscribe? Get an RSS button up above the fold. Add your RSS url to an auto discovery tag in the head template. If you really want to capture extra readers, add an RSS to email option like the one offered at Feedblitz.
• Putting a lot of contextual ads (especially un-customized ads) on top or within the posts is just plain ugly and inconvenient for the reader. Seeing those ads instantly drops credibility for the blog and makes it look desperate.
• If you are gracious enough to allow readers to make comments, perhaps responding to a few might be a thought? For those blogs that get a lot of comments, this can be difficult. Especially if you’re busy doing your regular job and don’t have a lot of time to spend on the blog all day. However, getting comments is one of the best signals of how well your content is resonating with readers. Most blog software will ping you an email when comments are made, so there’s no excuse not to make an appearance.
• Not publishing the date or the name of the author of the blog post is one of my pet peeves. I like to know the post is current and I always like to know who (real or persona) has written the post. Otherwise, it looks like a trick to make the blog seem updated when it’s not.
• You have such great content, why is it so difficult to find? Biggest offenses in this area are: No archives, no categories, no tags and no site search. C’mon people, this is easy stuff to implement and if you’re making it difficult for users to find your previous posts, chances are search engines aren’t having an easy time of it either. Just because it’s a blog doesn’t mean people are reading you every day and don’t need to see past posts. Show archives chronologically and by category. Offer related posts and recent posts. Give users multiple ways to find past content and you’ll increase repeat visitors as well as new visitors via search.

About the Author: Peter has an extensive knowledge of Internet Marketing and loves to write about it. He manages many campaigns on different levels as his articles states. The website he has developed is there to help anyone who needs it.

Article Source: EzineArticles.com