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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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.

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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.

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Luckily, I found a good plugin that might help me get rid of this error.  Its called Redirection.  This is a pretty powerful plugin that can moniter and resolve all your wordpress blog redirect problems but here I am just using it to force www for SEO.

Download the plugin here.

Unzip andUpload the redirection directory to your /wp-content/plugins directory.

Activate it from the plugins management page on your wordpress dashboard.

Configure from the Redirection tab under Tools

Click on the Modules Tab and click edit in the wordpress module.

(If the WordPress module shows inactive because you have not set up permalinks, you should proceed to do so.  Here is a good guide of the why and how.)

Under the details section select Force WWW for the canonical dropdown list.  For further seo optimization click on Strip index files in the Strip Index dropdown list.  Click Save.

Thats it.  Test if this works by trying your domain name without the ‘www’ in your browser and it should automatically redirect to www.yourdomainname..

The authors page with full directions and support can be found here http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection/

I’m happy to say that this has improved my website grader score and the 301 redirect issue does not show up anymore.

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