Frank Schulte-Ladbeck

How much content are you putting on a page, and is it useful to your visitors? Or could it be useful to you?

Could blogrolls be a thing of the past? I ask, because you may find that more sites are dumping their blogrolls for other features. Links pages are popular to a degree, but I think that they are taking on different forms. I debate about blogrolls on my sites. A few years back, I carefully crafted my blogroll to meet the best needs of my users. I began to use it as a social tool as well. I would include other blogs on my list that I wanted to interact with. Sometimes this tactic worked; sometimes not. As I became smarter about link building, I used the blogroll as a tool in this campaign: I will put you on mine if I am on yours. Eventually, the blogroll became a dead feature for me. I hardly ever clicked on anyone else’s list, and I did not go to many links/resource pages either.

    One reason for ignoring blogrolls was the sites where I ended up were no longer active. Blogs blaze onto the scene, then they blow away. On one of my sites, I studied closely how users moved through the site for a period of a month. What I discovered was that the blogroll was not used. I tried an experiment. Each week I had one post where I encouraged the readers to go to a site listed on the blogroll. One click resulted from this effort. After that, I decided to keep the blogroll, but I tried different positions. I ended with the blogroll being in the footer. I added people to it without a care. I then decided to remove it from that site.

Use analysis to make decisions about your website.

    Yet you have to understand that blogrolls are not for the visitors alone. Everything that I mentioned in the first paragraph still holds. The links on this list do represent your vote for worthy sites. Building relationships with others on the web is a vital part to success in this medium. I am more inclined to link to others in a post though. I found that visitors are more likely to click a link inside the content of a post than anywhere else on your site. The next spot where they will click is on a link provided in the comments when the article is popular. These would be your most viewed posts, top landing pages, or even top exit posts. Outside of popular articles, I find that users will click on your call to action links. For example, “get your free ebook” or “request a quote” are good calls to action. Then you have users who are researching some topic. I like following these users with my Click Track reports, because they show you how they would like the site structured to help them. For one month, I followed a user who was interested in real estate investing. He came to my site for a checklist, but then he went through posts. He (I only had the data from click track, so I do not know if this was a male or female or even a group on the same computer) quickly began to go to the section where I had photos from my home inspections. To be honest, the thought that real estate investors would use this section never dawned on me. Most of the photographs were there to show homeowners what to examine, or to show people how something was made. However, the fact that real estate investor needed to know how to evaluate a home is natural. I created a page for real estate investors with links to the sections that I discovered other investors are using most.
    Using Click Track for analysis, I became aware that I was not effectively bringing users through the site to convert them to clients. I knew that not all of the visitors are in my target audience (my business is only in Houston, and I have visitors from all over). I began to experiment with different setups on the page. I really liked how my home page appeared in one version, but I stumbled without knowing it. I had improved clicks, and this may be due to changing the page. My failure was that checking the page with crawl test, I saw that my new set up was not being seen by the search engine bots. I found that I could improve clicks and have the search engines find the content with a clean layout. Visitors do not desire to read a novel when looking for one bit of data. This is the layout that I am refining: Blog title/ Post title/ H3 tag that contains an excerpt about the post or a teaser/ opening paragraph has to be keyword rich, but it also has to encourage further reading/ H3 tags for each section that has an overarching idea/ place appropriate links into paragraphs below these tags. This gives readers a quick way to find the information they need, or they could read the entire article. This layout works for the post, but you have to consider the entire site after this step. If the user read the entire article, what is next?

Deleting features can seem to be a tough call for emotional reasons, but pruning dead wood could benefit your site.

    If they are willing to explore your site, you have to make it easy for them to move about. Related Posts at the end of an article is good. I do not try to bombard users with every post that I have ever written. I list popular posts on my pages; related posts at the end of a post; and my most recent posts in the sidebar. We have created a plethora of internal links. Do we need to inundate the user with more? I think navigation  to pages along the top is necessary (having page navigation in other areas of the site can be problematic, since users visit so many sites with top navigation). For me, category navigation becomes the next big thing. There are users who will go in depth through your site by studying a certain topic. (I do this often on sites, and my click track shows that visitors do this on my site). I like the category menu bars on sites, but I like the list of categories that I have in a sidebar too. I have advertising in my sidebars, but I am rethinking the sidebar ads. My Google ads along the top of the sites does much better than the sidebar. I see more sites shoving material onto their sidebars. I hardly look at them. I wonder what their analytics say. Do people use all of this data? Somehow, I think not. 
    In my thoughts,  I decided that the blogroll was no longer needed on one site; however, on this site I felt that I would leave it in place. Those are my votes for sites that I wish people to read. By using a study of different data sources, you can begin to plan out your website to best meet your visitor’s requirements, which will hopefully lead to conversions. Currently, I am experimenting with Resource/Links pages. First, calling them a resource or links page seems to be detrimental. There are so many bad versions of the pages. I do not use them unless I am studying link building. That being said, many websites offer quality links in these pages, since the business thought carefully about which sites could help their users. I believe that a new small business website should find a creative title for this page, and then put some effort into making the links page be a real resource.

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