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20 Tips To Optimize Your HomePage

Everybody talks about optimizing the website as a whole, but it is of equal importance to optimize this single, most important page – HomePage (face of your website).

For almost all the websites, the most ranked and visited page is its homepage. So optimizing it makes a lot of sense. If you feel the same, then continue reading..

Here are some of the aspects that you can tweak, inorder to optimize your homepage:

1. Do not show full article on your homepage. If you are showing 10 full articles on your homepage, then it will take a lot of time to load.
And from users perspective, they may not have the patience to scroll down and digg your website looking for good content. Internet is full of information overload and they may just leave your website and go somewhere else.

On the downside, people need to do an extra click to get to the content, if you start showing post excerpts.

2. If you are showing only excerpts on your homepage, then try to limit it to 8 or 10 post excerpts. If you show 20 to 25 post excerpts on your homepage, then the user experience will again be bad.

3. Use less images on your homepage.: Images consume most of the bandwidth. Images can be used wisely to grab the attention, but if we do not take that extra care to optimize the image, then we will surely have to pay for that latter. It would be better to avoid more images on the homepage.

4. Use less advertisements on your homepage or no advertisement on your home page: The best example for this is Google. Google.com is the simplest and most used search engine in the world and still it doesn’t have a ad on its homepage. Get a clue from it.

5. Optimize all the images that you are showing on your homepage, using some image optimization tools.

6. As far as possible, try avoiding if-else programs on your homepage. Ex:- Showing one ad to facebook visitors and other for Search Engine visitors and another for people coming from Twitter!

7. Remove the widgets and badges from the homepage. Retain only the most important.

8. Avoid animated contents from your homepage, inorder to speedup the load time of your pages and to not divert the attention of your reader, from the beginning.

9. Choose a proper webhost, with good uptime, speed of servers and support.

10. Make use of custom Excerpt option in WordPress and make the excerpts on your homepage more meaningful. Create enthusiasm or the need to read more situation to someone who reads the excerpts on your homepage!

11. You can lessen the ads on the homepage and put link or banner to your own interesting articles or categories of articles. This will give the user more options to navigate. And you can engage your reader for more time, showcasing good articles.

12. Remove the digg, tweetmeme and other buttons from the article excerpts. Show them only on the full post, if necessary.

13. Use labels: Label all the things properly on your homepage. Ex: Recent articles, Popular posts etc, for better user experience. Visitors must not feel, as if they have landed in a wild forest!

14. Test your optimized homepage: Testing is the only way to go. Big internet companies like Google rely only on its continuous testing. But Google, Yahoo, Microsoft has a lot of employees for testing. Now how can you do testing with your website/blog? Most of the times, owner of the blog gets blind to many components on the blog, like, the widgets, labeling, etc. So it is a good practice to arrange a party for your friends(who don’t know about your blog) and tell them to surf and give feed back about 2 or 3 websites(one of which is yours!). Keep doing it once in a while. Do not over do it. You may just endup in testing and may forget the main element of the blog, which is content.

15. Menu bar: Most surfers are used to the menu bar placed at the top, than on the sidebar. So it must be clearly placed in a prominent position and do not mix it with your categories and other stuffs.

16. Show navigation menu or main menu both in the header as well as in the footer.

17. Make sure to have “Popular Articles” or “Recommended Articles” list on the homepage. So that first time visitors know where to look at, for the best contents on your blog. And with the best content, they are more likely to stick to your blog.

18. Show your subscriber count or Twitter follower count as a social proof, if you have some significant numbers.

19. As far as possible avoid flash contents from homepage. You may annoy and drag your readers out of your blog even before they read any of your stuffs!

20. Make your website/blog logo clickable and link it to your homepage.

Please share your optimization tips with us. So that everyone of us can improve our website/blogs.

Adsense Homepage Changed — Login Problem!

We just tried to check our adsense account. But to our surprise, we saw the adsense homepage being changed. But wait…that’s not the reason for our surprise, as we already knew that homepage is going to change shortly. The surprise is, we were not able to log into our adsense account!
Hmm..we immediately visited our blog, and the ads were still delivered on our blog. Meaning, we are not banned from adsense for any anonymous reasons!
So we think its the problem from their end.
adsense-homepage
The new homepage looks clean. And there is a link called “solutions for publishers!“, which has the link to all the products from Google which are useful for publishers.
The problem is: When we click on the “Already using AdSense? Sign in »” link it takes us to the log in screen. Which basically increases the number of clicks!
adsense-login-screen
And when we type our Gmail ID and password(associated with adsense), it takes us to “Manage Account“. Where it shows all the Google services we are presently signedup with. Now if you click on the adsense link, it will again take you to the new Adsense homepage and again to the same login screen, when you click on “Already using AdSense? Sign in »” !
So we are still not able to log into our adsense account and there are no official words yet about these changes on adsense blog.
I am sure that adsense team will already be working hard to fix the problem. Just waiting for their final words on their blog.

Did you notice the new adsense homepage? Do you think its better than the old one. We know that it doesn’t make much difference for people using adsense from many years, but it will surly make a huge difference for the first time visitor.
And the important thing…Are you able to log into your adsense account? Did you encounter any problem while logging in?

” The issue is confirmed. Many people are facing the same problem. Interestingly enough, if you try to log into the same account using some other computer or with other browser in the same computer, there is chances that you see the same old login screen and you can normally log into your adsense account. Hope Adsense team is testing something new and will roll out things to everyone soon or if the login problem persists, adsense team may roll back this new change and may show the usual login screen. Lets hope for the best 🙂 “

“If you have any urgency in checking your adsense earnings and impressions then go ahead and log into your analytics account, if you have integrated it with your adsense account, to get all those details. Just a temporary work around 🙂 “. But remember Analytics will not show you real time updates!

Link love for people who involve in conversation @ Technotip.org

We started this blog mainly for the purpose of building a community over here. And wanted to share our views, thoughts here and let others share their thoughts and views. Remember, we always believe in these words – “If two people exchange 1$, both will have 1$ each. But if they exchange 1 idea, both will have 2 ideas each”.
So involve in the conversation and make this blog more lively. As a bonus, we link back to our Top 10 commentators from our homepage.
We love to link to everyone reading our blog, but you know, that is not possible. As this blog would look spammy to search engines and mainly its not the purpose people visit Technotip.org, people want some good information out of our site and they wouldn’t like to see bunch of links to someother blogs.
Please do not comment on our blog, just to get linkback from the homepage!
Make sure that your comment adds value to everyone reading it. You will get more traffic to your site, if you comment more relevantly. This practice will bring in traffic to your blog consistently over time.Share your ideas liberally. The benefits from accountability and feedback outweigh the risk that someone steals your idea! Many productive creative professionals and entrepreneurs claim that they become more committed to their ideas after telling people about them! The fact is that great ideas are plentiful, and very few people have the discipline and resources to make them happen. When you feel accountable to others, you are more likely to stay focused.

Wordpress has made the commenting so easy and adds more fun. You can interact with the blogger or/and even with the other commentators. Share your thoughts with other commentators, this is a best practice, in terms of getting traffic as well as to get attention and make the conversation more valuable.
The philosophy to “share ideas liberally” defies the age-old instinct to keep ideas secret. However, the creative person’s tendency to jump from idea-to-idea-to-idea causes most ideas to die in isolation. Creative professionals should take every opportunity to communicate new ideas broadly, seek feedback, and develop a sense of accountability.
And do not be harsh or abuse other commentators or the blogger! etc etc etc, we hope you know all those bla bla bla..
And remember, we have comment moderation. “Akismet” plugin will help us fight with spams.
Be wise, be responsible, be cautious….thats what we can say, rest you know 🙂

New ad formate in yahoomail homepage

As we all know, search engine giants have always found new ways to show ads in order to make money.Previously yahoo started showing rollover ads(flash ads which start playing once we rollover our mouse pointer over it).

Today moring as I was checking my emails I came accross this peel ad in my yahoomail homepage.

We know that peel ads are sometimes annoying, as it may automatically come inbetween when trying to click something.But yahoo is smart enough.Their peel ad works only when we click on the click to peel option(as you can see in the below screenshot).

Here is the screen shot….

yahoo-mail-homepage-peal-ad

After we click on the click to peel, we get to see some ad in action, and click on it to see more details(taking us to the advertisers website) or you can just close the ad by clicking Close option(as you can see in below screen shot).

yahoo-mail-homepage-peal-ad-inaction-fullscreen

I saw that these ads are not still available in all yahoomail accounts.And I think, as I have my domain registered ( http://technotip.org ) at Yahoo, I am getting these new ad formate in my account.Hope Yahoo thinks me as a loyal Yahoo customer(and I am).

Another ad that I have seen is, a 200X200 ad in the leftside sidebar, inside yahoomail.

Take a look at it:-

yahoo-mail-sidebar-ad-200X200

Hope Yahoo! is working very hard these days, after Microsoft tried to takeover Yahoo.

We have recently seen Yahoo adding two more mail domain Ymail and Rocketmail to its basket, to provoid email address that you always wanted and was unavailable.

And signing up a deal with Google to show adsense ads or Google Adword ads in Yahoo search result pages.

I think these are all some good sign of improvement to Yahoo.

I wish Yahoo! a great success in all its good efforts.

Have you also seen these peel ads in your yahoomail homepage or anyother new ads other than rollover ads(rolled over to all yahoomail accounts) in your yahoomail.If so, please share it with us in the comment section.