Weekly Geeks 2009-38: Difficult to Navigate blogs

This week's Weekly Geeks task basically asks us to consider how navigable our blogs are, whether people can find what they want, whether they have a whole raft of features, such as this checklist.

• navigable site
  
• tags
• RSS feed button
• contact details
• comments space
• searchable
• links all work
• rating system accessible
• glossary of strange acronyms

One of the problems with developing your blog is that it grows a bit like Topsy, or in our local idiom, like "the house that Jack built". The Jack in question added rooms and other features as the mood or the need took him, and the result was a bit like this beautiful image (reproduced here under Creative Commons licencing). Click on the image and you'll see the portfolio it is part of.

I've done the blog analysis thingy several times now, taken people's advice, swept away features that I was really fond of but others found cluttersome, and I think the result is that what I've got I really like.

I've thought about how and why "traffic" comes to my blog.
If I look at the various analysis tools I have running, particularly the FEEDJIT, what I've learnt is that while I have a number of followers and friends who visit regularly and read most new posts, about half my visitors come as a result of a search for specific content. Sometimes I don't really understand, given what they were searching for, why Google threw them my way. But often they have searched for a particular book or a particular author, and I am just a tram stop on their quest for information.
So in terms of being part of that search train, a critical mass of crime fiction reviews, information about authors etc. is important. The more there is , the more visitors will come.
The interesting thing about the "searching" visitors is that they have been delivered to a specific page on the blog, and often go no further. Sometimes they they look around a little, but not often.

Sitemeter gives me this sort of information:

	Average Per Day	151
	Average Visit Length	1:58
	Last Hour	9
	Today	83
	This Week	1,058

So you see most stay for as long as it takes them to read the review or the post.

Participating in community events such as Weekly Geeks, Sunday Salon and Pattinase's Friday's Forgotten Books, brings people to your blog, although not a lot of them seem to be crime fiction addicts like me. Hosting events yourself such as the Agatha Christie Reading Challenge, the Agatha Christie Blog Tour, and my latest, the Crime Fiction Alphabet Community Meme, will bring visitors too and cement your place in the genre community.

The most solid advice I can give to other bloggers is to make sure that people have something to do when they come to your blog. Run an event, a poll, or a giveaway, or put yourself into the review chain. By the latter I mean, when you write a review give the readers other places to go to add to what they have found out from you. Link to the author's site, or to other reviews of the same book.

So now, off you go back to the Weekly Geeks home page, and see what others have said (You've spent your allocated minute ot two here). Come back some time soon. Oh, by the way, why not leave a comment to let me know what you think of my ramblings?