Each and every blogger on this earth should watch this video fully, to learn some of the best practices, which Google itself follows.
This is a video recording of Marissa Mayer’s keynote that she recently delivered at the Google I/O Developers Conference. You’ll learn some very interesting facts about Google in this video. But more importantly, you should observe and relate or compare every aspects followed by Google to that followed by you, on your blog.
This would give you some idea of where you are doing wrong and what you should do, so that, to be on right track.
Here are some of the points you should observe and learn from this video….
1. Google has employed designers, fashion designers, cartoonists, choreographers, developers etc mainly for its iGoogle project. So that, each and every aspect of their website is professional looking. So we should also give importance to every aspect of our blog, starting from the logo, design, content, layout, advertisements etc. It should be handled professionally.
2. Watch the video at 4min 55 sec, here Mayer is talking about the simple design of Google homepage. We should also make our website/blog as simple as possible, Without including more images, flash, etc, which increases the load time of our blog.
3. Get some friends and tell them to use your blog. Get some unbiased feedback. Take all the feed backs positively. Actually, negative feed back will help us a lot to improve our blog.
4. You have to know about how the data transfer takes place when a user visits your blog.
When a visitor visits your blog, all the http request is sent from the users computer to all the http objects present on your blog page. So if you have many objects displayed on your blog from different servers, then the load time would definitely be higher.
Its ideal to place all the objects like images, scripts etc inside one server and then link them on to your blog.
Also the speed of the server(where you have hosted your blog) is also important. And if you have frequent downtime means, you should think of changing your host. Technotip.org recommends Doreo host.
5. A/B split testing. Use some testing methods to determine the logo positioning, advertisement positioning etc.
6. Positioning of each thing on your blog will contribute to your success or failure. So be careful in A/B split testing.
7. “If you don’t listen to your customers, someone else will”. — Sam Walton.
8. “If I had asked people, what they wanted. They would have said, faster horses”. — Henry Ford.
9. Number of items displayed on your blog also play a vital role.
It is recommended that, you should remove all those widgets, badges, social networking link logos etc from your side bar, as it increase the load time and contributes for the bad user experience.
Social networking link logos can be displayed in your about me page or contact page.
10. Faster loading websites get more returning visitors over time.
11. Allow the comments to show on your blog, by making comment moderation quicker. And it will be good to see their comments live as soon as possible. And also reply for the comments quickly and aptly and promptly. This will show your commentators(who are the actual contributes of your blog) that, you value their voice(opinion).
12. Always welcome feedback.
13. Be upto date and blog according to the current trends of your niche.
14. Once you have implemented everything in your blog(after A/B slip testing), just don’t think its the perfect one. You need to run A/B slit testing again after a year or two. Because, the user requirements change along with time and you need to be quick to act accordingly.
15. Translating your blog to multiple languages would help to gain more visitors. But if you are not comfortable with that, then you can always make use of language translation tool, to give the option to read your blog in multiple languages.
16. Have “Healthy disrespect for the impossible”. — Larry page.
17. Nothing can be a perfect solution. We have to work constantly and keep moving nearer and nearer to perfection.
18. Imagination is muscle…We need to assume ourselves for What problems to work on, what products to develop etc.
19. Respond faster, for all those who report any bug on your blog.
If you can’t resolve the problem, just inform them that, you are working on it currently.
In some cases, the reporter of the bug himself/herself may even give the solution to the problem.
20. Watch from 45th min of the video to see a small Summary of this video.
Watch from 46th min for the question and answer session with Marissa Mayer.
These are some of the things that I could make out while watching this video. But this is not the end. Each person has his own ability to watch and understand. You may even get some more ideas after watching this video. If this is a case with you, then please share your thoughts in the below comment section..