3 Elements Every Blog Should Have

There are many ways you can look to improve a website. However, it depends what type of website you are running. For most, it will be in the format of a blog since the start up costs for blog-styled websites are not as much as it is for other types of websites (like e-commerce websites). For those that are creating and maintaining blog-styled websites, knowing what to actually include on the website can be a tricky task to say the least. For this reason, here are three elements or ‘things’ you should make sure you are including on your blog-styled website.

#1 Share Buttons

It is an absolute necessity to blogs to include social media share buttons somewhere on the site whether it is a widget in the sidebar, at the top of the website as buttons or floating to the side of your content. The main traffic source of blogs should be organic. However, with social media sharing, social media traffic can give you extremely healthy spikes in traffic depending on who and how many people share it. Always remember your article will struggle to go viral without share buttons.

#2 Search Widget

Again, like share buttons, this is an absolute necessity. The chances are that if people enter onto your blog through organic search results, they will have found an article that can be deemed useful to them. But, what if there is another article that they are looking for on the internet that might already be on your blog? Without a search widget, they will never be able to find the article as some blogs have thousands of articles. By providing a search widget not only will allow people to view the articles and content they want to view, it will also show them a list of other related articles similar to what they searched for which they may also be interested in.

#3 Related Posts

Now, this is not really a necessity as compared to share buttons and a search widget. Nevertheless, it is still crucial to the success of your blog. A related posts widget is a great way to gain some extra pageviews from visitors helping to decrease the bounce rate of your website. If you use tags, categories or labels in your blog posts (which you really should do if you are not at the moment!), related posts show articles that are within that tag/category or label.

For this reason, related post widgets are best located just under the content of blogs. This is because it means after web users read the content of the blog post, the related posts will show similar articles enticing them to continue reading onto the same topic – a really effective use of space for such an important widget to the blog’s health!