SidekickBlog

Introduction

I love blogs with interesting footers.  In a typical blog, the footer describes the bottom of the website below the dynamic content and sidebars.  This area often does not receive the attention it deserves and is often used only for copyright information or some navigation links.  

I believe that a well designed footer can greatly increase a blog’s functionality and visual appeal.  Consequently when rating Wordpress themes, I give more importance to those that allow you to customize footers easily by using footer widgets.  Footers can be used in a variety of ways.

Some of the ways footers can be used

Links to important posts, pages:  This will help expose sections of your blog that need more visitors.  I have read that this also helps in SEO (although how much is debatable).  Take a look at the footer of mint.com.  I am sure that all those key words and phrases have to be adding positive SEO value to their website.

Guide your visitors to their next destination: Users reaching the end of the content on a particular page are usually itching to find something else to browse.  Unless you provide them fresh content they might just jump to another website.  If nothing else, just put a PPC ad over there.  Google link units are another option but they can look ugly. 

Affiliate links & advertisements to your own products (and other blogs): It can be argued that a high percentage of viewers who have read your blog till the bottom of the page are interested in what you have to say and would be easiser to sell to.  Take a look at the above footer snapshot from Problogger.com.  Renowned blogger Darren Rowse uses his footer to list his ‘Recommended Money Makers’ which probably contain affiliate links.  Since he blogs about blogging and has a popular ‘making money through blogging’ section, these links are a perfect fit for his website.  

Visitors that like the look of your website often look in the footer for theme attributions.  If you use a premium theme that has an affiliate program, you should definately enroll and include an affiliate link to the theme in the footer.  A short positive review of the premium theme is also recommended.

Stash content that you need on every page but does not have to be immediately visible:  This may include reciprocal links to blog directories and other links that help to promote your own blog.  Also, a contact form can be included here as visitors that want to contact you will usually make an effort to look around for the form. 

Improve your blog’s looks: Most blog footers load last and so do not interfere with the accessibility with the rest of the blog’s content.  This means that all that cool art and images that you have been hesitating to put on your blog because you fear increased load times can go in the footer (Ofcourse this does not mean you do not web optimize the images.)  If done in the right way, this can do wonders in adding personality to your blog. 

Conclusion

I am really glad the theme I am using currently for this blog came with footer widgets.  This helped me get started with using the footer effectively before I learned how to customize footers myself.  Unfortunately, the Mimbo 3.0 theme I recently switched Recipe Mobile to did not come with footer widgets.  I will try to add these myself over the weekend and will post details on this blog.  Eventually, I would also love to add some image elements there (if somebody would only help me with the art!)

Have you used footer on your blog in interesting ways or have seen it done on any other blog?  Do you believe that footers should get the same attention as sidebars and mastheads?  

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I’m pretty happy about this as I thought it would take longer.  I believe there was a page rank update back in March but I did not bother looking until today.  Previously this blog had no page rank (it’s not even 2 months old).  Considering that there are less than 30 posts, I guess some of my SEO work has paid off.

Oddly, Recipe Mobile only has a PR1 even though it has almost 75 posts and I have done a lot more work on it than on this website. Also, it receives a lot more visitors from Google Search than this blog does.

Tamal Anwar (@tamalanwar on twitter) sent out a tweet about this RSS Feed directory list.  It has a huge number of of rss feed directories that you can submit your blogs rss feed to to create backlinks of your latest posts.Technorati Tags: SEO, RSS

Backlinks to your website from other sites with high PR(Page Rank) help you get a high PR yourself.  To check the number of backlinks you have on a regular basis, use this free tool.  It gives you a report of the backlinking sites PR, whether it is a nofollow link (in which case it cannot help you as google crawlers won’t use it) and the anchor text used.

This is also a great way to get find places your website is being discussed so that you can get involved at the point of contact and increase conversions.

I have been progressively taking SEO steps for recipemobile and one of the tools that I have used to point out SEO issues is the website grader service.  I have managed to consistently improve the score over the past week.  Getting indexed on google really helped my score.  Another issue that the service was pointing out was that I do not have a 301 redirect from http://recipemobile.com to http://www.recipemobile.com.  Although, there are probably quick ways to fix this using the .htaccess file, I was not comfortable mucking around with this.

Luckily, I found a good plugin that might help me get rid of this error.   (continue reading…)