Saturday, July 15, 2006

Don't go Over board with lists of links in a Blog

One tip that is very useful for improving your blog for your readers and for search engine bots is to keep your pages or blog articles limited to no more than 100 hyperlinks. Including too many links on a page makes it difficult for readers to absorb the content. It can also be interpreted in a negative fashion by Search Engines like Google that attempt to identify the importance of you page and the related links. Too many links suggests an abuse. If you are writing a blog article, I'd even further suggest limiting this number to no more than 30 and it should be balanced with at least 10 paragraphs of text.

In addition, use the hyperlink option in blogger if you do not know how to create tags. Hide the unsightly full hyperlinks and encase the link in text or even in a picture so that readers do not have to read long URLS.

Long URLs can create problems with blogger templates as well. If the width of a URL is longer than a browser window allows in the body/content section, it may shove the sidebar to the bottom of the blog where its not visible. If your side bar disappears, this is the first thing you should check as a troubleshooting steps to fix your blog. (Pictures that are too wide is the 2nd thing you should check.)

For more information on general tips check out Google's Webmaster Guidelines section for more information.

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