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Theme clutter, site maps, hmmm?
By Mike | May 27, 2008
Today’s question:
Does or should a Blog have a sitemap? I see too many blogs that are all over the place in their design. I want to be able to follow some kind of “order with a purpose” in designing my blog but not too busy that it drives traffic away. It seems as though there is a delicate balance here, right.
A very good question but I think you don’t quite have the terminology quite right.
I do recommend that you use a sitemap plugin so that you can automate the spidering of your site. I do not use a sitemap for people to read.
One of the things that WordPress does quite well is to organize the navigation of your blog. The more tightly targeted your content is to a single subject the better a blog performs with a few exceptions.
One of the things I like to do especially for my niche blogs is to pick out the major areas I want to emphasize and use them for categories. If you are dealing with a very specific topic this will probably give you between 4 -10 categories. These would be your upper level keywords you want to target.
Now if you are doing a general blog like I do with my name blog it can end up being many more because it tends to be more eclectic and cover a much wider range of topics. (Not something I recommend except for name blogs.)
If I understand your real question and unfortunately this means I have to use that ass/u/me word, you are looking for a checklist more for your side bar so that it doesn’t become too overwhelming.
The key will be how you are using the blog and what your monetization is. For most I use something like this but it does vary from topic to topic.
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Lead capture form - If you have followed me at all you know why.
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Pages - this is where I will have things like about but it will depend on the theme as this theme lists pages in a top header so this would be redundant on this particular theme.
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Categories
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Recent posts
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Recent Comments
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Links
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Subscribe Me
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Tag cloud
That would be the basics but if you use things like My Blog Log I would use their widget too.
The key though is not to copy the order but see what your primary goal is. If it was to attract people to my links then that would move up as an example. It really depends on your own goals and testing and tweaking to see what gets the most attention and putting your primary goal in that position.
Hope this helps as I hate answering questions where I use that ass/u/me word. If not resubmit or leave a comment here and we can continue the conversation.
As always your comments and questions are welcomed.
Mike Paetzold
P.S. I just updated the 7 Tips book and if you have bought it before you need to login and download the latest version.
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