Blog features are intended to enhance the user experience by improving search ability of a post, community engagement, content sharing and much more. These are the key features of a blog.
- The Right Structure
- Main Images
- Content Formatting Flexibility
- Categories
- Bio and authorship
- Blog Post Archive
- Search Feature
- Social Networking integration
- RSS Feed
- Comment system
- Contact
Key Features of a Blog
Today, almost everyone who are online knows the advantages of blogging for a business, no matter what is the size of your business – your business will benefits from blogging.
A well managed blog is fundamental to internet visibility. The ability of it to produce a presence, a feeling of community, and also an avenue of direct communication to the your specific readership is priceless.
A blog provides businesses an opportunity to establish themselves as an expert, work on on their branding, and put out organization news direct to their customers and clients.
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Having an active, strong, and social online presence is now a total necessity in this brand new era of running a business, and a blog site is another powerful tool that business owners should use to bring their businesses to the next level.
Although, running a blog is great for your business, it would be better not to blog at all than having a badly written, out of date content, or maybe lackluster blog. An poorly managed blog can be a powerfully drawback which will bring negative impact on your business.
11 Important Features of a Blog
This blog post covers the key features of a blog. These blog features are intended to enhance the user experience by improving community engagement, search ability of a post, content sharing and much more.
Here is the 11 key features of a great blog.
1. The Right Structure
The structure of a blog is often being overlooked aspect in blogging. Without having a set of right structure, you will have scatter-brained and appear to be unorganized.
No one is going to spend their time to read an unorganized post. A good structure can make your blog posts blog posts of easy to skim, readable, and easier for sharing.
And, when you have a good and consistent structure, your readers is able to know what they should expect from you and begin to trust your blog more.
2. Main Images
Everything looks nicer with an great photo or even graphic. Using the right images can tell your audience what your post is about. Sometimes, an images is well worth than a paragraph of text.
You’ll want the place an image in the top part of the post (just like what we did on this post).
3. Content Formatting Flexibility
Most blog systems are going to have content formatting capabilities integrated, but it is always good to double check.
The ability to format content, videos, and images is not only form making your blog post nicer, but it aso makes them much easier to read.
4. Categories
In order to keep your blog organized and let your audience to be easily fcontentind what they’re looking for, categories plays an important role. You’ll need to make sure your categories can be seen from your main page.
Don’t go crazy with tonne of different categories. However, you’ll need place everything which is related under the same categories keep it neat and easy for search.
5. Bio and Authorship
Will you have several authors writing for your blog? You should consider about including authorship within your system. Many companies choose to have articles created underneath the company’s name.
However, if that is not what you want, you’re able to allow your authors to have their authorship and bio abilities that may be adjusted for every post.
6. Blog Post Archive
Normally, when website visitors first reach on your blog’s main page, they are welcomed with the newest blog articles sorted from newest on top to the order one at the bottom.
Most readers would expect to get on the latest and fresh content from a blog that they’ve landed. Your audience will love going through your older articles after they’ve started to trust you and your content.
An archive is a page or maybe area in your blog which lists previous blog articles, customarily sorted in a rational manner such as for instance by date or even by category – is a great method to draw in even more page views and also improves the capability of readers to discover articles on the site of yours.
An article archive is able to function as a means to boost the conversion of first time visitors to steadfast readers since it shows them what you should expect in case they decide to follow the blog of yours. For existing readers, an article archive gives fast access to posts they wish to revisit.
7. Search Feature
Apart from visiting your blog archives, visitors do not other choices for finding content in your blog. They could use online search engine to browse your site’s indexed content.
But for the convenience of your audience, you shouldn’t expect them to leave your blog for another website to find certain blog posts. It’s important to have a search feature on all pages on your blog to boost a better user experience.
8. Social Networking Integration
Content on your blog is intended to be shared. Make sure it is easy for your audience to share yours posts in the social media sites by integrating social-media-sharing on your blog.
Most social media sites have APIs which you’re able to use for your blog. For instance, Facebook and Twitter provides widgets and buttons you are able to install and customize on your blog.
9. RSS Feed
At the very beginning, RSS started as a simple method to distribute information throughout the net, although many people did not really know about the use of it.
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With blogs currently being updated often, along with the huge amount of blogs these days, RSS has allowed audience to continue receiving completely new information on their preferred blogs without having to regularly check out on those blog to see if something’s new has been published.
With free RSS feed readers, for example Google Reader, it is much more easier for readers to stay updated with their preferred blogs.
Creating an RSS feed for your own blog has become a necessity. People who interested will be searching for that standard orange RSS feed icon from you blog which signifying that your blog has a RSS feed.
RSS can provides you with opportunities to develop a faithful following and also expand your own community due to members staying tuned for the changes of your blog.
Many content management systems are going to have RSS features built right in. When you are searching for something which is much more robust, you’re able to utilize a totally free service such as Feedburner. It comes with resources for checking, analyzing, and optimizing the usage of your RSS feed.
10. Comment System
The advantage of blogs compared to media in the older days such as TV and print is that readers of blogs have the opportunity to interact with the content provider.
From an audience’s perspective, it is enticing in order to give ideas or leave a little remark, and to discuss the subjects further after reading at an articles that they like.
The commenting abilities on your blog will boost community building by making it possible for your audience to go over the topic of an article and discuss with other readers who also read that blog post. It empowers readers by making the reading experience engaging and interactive.
11. Contact
You’ve to make it easy for your audience to contact and connect with you. The ability to get in touch with a blog owner is essential because the human element of a blog is what that actually makes the readers keep coming back.
Your audience should have the opportunity in order to reach you for questions, to talk share ideas and tips for future blog posts, making comments they are reluctant to share publicly, to report problems about the blog, and also to offer opportunities for cooperation with you.
You can use contact web form that already built in or pick any of the contact plugin that is widely available to make it easier for others to contact you.
And of course, e-mail is still useful and important. In case you’re not in place to use forms, at least show your email address on the footer, contact page or maybe sidebar.
Key Features of a Blog – Conclusion
These are the key features that you must keep in mind when creating a blog. You may have visited through a lot of sites and you’ll notice that a lot of the above mentioned features mentioned in this post are utilized in different ways and styled differently.
No matter how it has been done or use, the objective is the same which is to offer the audience an optimum experience on your blog.
So, is there any other features that you think is important to boost user experience a site? What is your strategy to have a better user experience? Leave me a comment below and kindly share this post.