Google Panda and Penguin have unleashed much havoc across the blogosphere, hammering bloggers in a variety of wages. Some of the complaints include a drop in web traffic, disappearing SERPs and a monumental fall in PageRank. You may be doing everything right to update and promote your site, but it may be a good idea to return to several foundational essentials that can unleash your blog and turn it into a terrific site.

Load Times

If your site takes a long time to load, you will lose visitors. Some experts contend that you have no more than five seconds to have your site load, with people frustratingly moving on to the next site that loads on demand.

There can be any number of factors that slow down your load times. For starters, how many posts are loading up on your front page? The more is not necessarily the merrier here as each post can load one by one and present a drag on your site.

You should also limit your links and use of third party JavaScript. If you must use JavaScript, you would do better to stick this information at the bottom of your page. Limit the number of pictures you have loaded on your site. Consider using a Flickr album to post your photos in your side bar. Use a page loading tester such as the one found on Numion.com to check load times.

Smart Navigation

Your site should be easy to navigate and enjoyable to use. Display your key links in your navigation bar on the top of the page and repeat these links in the side bar. In the side bar you can also add sub pages to make it easier for people to find your links.

Make use of BreadCrumbs to help your visitors track what page they are on and where they have left. Place tags in the sidebar for another way to attract clicks to particular subjects. If you need additional link space, stick your not so important links in the footer.

Your Audience

There are some websites that are impossibly indiscernible except for the brightest minds in academia. While there is a place for presenting top quality work, generally most blogs should aim for a broader audience.

Consider that some of your visitors are not native English speakers. Moreover, not everyone that finds your site is college-educated. You do not need to dumb down your site, but you must consider the language you use to convey your points. Aim for a middle-school audience and you will capture more people without boring your college-educated native speakers.

You should also break your articles up into manageable pieces, using shorter paragraph, sub-headers, bullets and italics to make your point. Figure that most people scan the Internet and will do the same with your article. Catch their attention and they will hang around longer. Make use of eye candy (photographs with captions) to draw them in.

Link Verification

Links to pages within your site and to relevant pages outside of your site is critical to your site’s development and overall authority. Do not skimp here: automating your internal links can be done with a WordPress plugin, but carefully manually linking to the appropriate pages is a more sensible approach.

Your outbound links must always be related to your subject matter. As you source your information, take not of who said what and link within the body of your article. No need to go crazy here, but do link out to two or three relevant websites as appropriate.

Verifying that a link is a good one is something that can only be done by humans. Keep in mind that you should also check that your existing links still go to active websites. Use an online broken link checker to find distinctly broken links. Make repairs or eliminate that link completely. Enhance the user experience by serving up only the best links possible.

Contact Information

It is amazing how difficult it can be to contact some blog owners. Certainly, a tool such as domaintools.com might reveal that information, but why make it so difficult on everyone? Instead, put your contact information out there and make it easy for people to reach out to you.

If you use WordPress, there are several contact page tool plugins that get the job done. Choose one, stick it on a page that you call “contact” and then include that link in your navigation bars as well as at the bottom of your web pages. Do not just put the contact form out there — when you get contacted, respond! Of course, ignore the spam requests, but you will get enough legitimate contacts to make it worth your while.

Not Done

You are not done yet. Or, at least you will never be done. Maintaining a stellar website is a process, not a completion point. Just when you think that you have it just right, you will find other matters that need to be tended to.

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