Blog Audit Week 1 Winner - Nierva.com

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Congratulations to Charles of Nierva.com for winning the first week of the Blog Audit Contest. Every week, I will be choosing a lucky winner and providing a blog audit - including SEO, monetization, and site structure. If you’d like to win next week, make sure you submit an entry for the Weekly Blog Audit Contest.

Let’s dive into Nierva.com.

Here are some of my initial thoughts upon visiting the site:

• Never advertise on your site that you are a newbie blogger.
  Do you want to be considered a newbie blogger in such a competitive industry? This is a mistake and “newbie” should be deleted from your header as well as from your about page and copy. You won’t be a newbie for long so why give off this impression? Big turn off.
• Convoluted navigation
  Your top navigation is cluttered and contains pages that are unnecessary. For example, your “Photos” link leads to an empty page with no photos. This offers no value for your users. Only include items that pertain to your site’s topic, which in this case is “make money online”. Also, your “User Online”, “Disclosure”, and “Webmail” sections should not be in the top navigation. Move these somewhere else as these don’t have high importance. You can even afford to move the “Archive” from the top navigation as well.
• Don’t include site stats yet
  While it is very popular for bloggers to include their Feedburner stats, it is not wise for new blogs to display their low readership count. Wait until you have more readers to display this. Otherwise visitors will come in and leave immediately because of the low number. Same goes for the User Online count, post views count, Alexa traffic rank, and the pay per post cost. Image is everything in this business.
• Permalink structure
  Use a URL structure that does not include the dates. For example, it is better to use nierva.com/free-online-dating-site-friendsation/ rather than nierva.com/2007/11/10/free-online-dating-site-friendsation/. This is better in terms of SEO, easier for users wanting to distribute your URL, and more effective for instances when you want to update posts and be free of a certain posting date.
• Blend in Adsense ads
  Your Adsense ads tend to stick out from the rest of your page content. Change the color of your Adsense links to match the color of the links on the rest of your site. This will blend in your ads with the rest of the page and improve your click through rate.
• Too much advertising
  Your site is rather new but has too much advertising on it, especially on the bottom portion. Cut down on the advertising and only include ads that give you the highest return. The advertising is slowing down your site quite a bit as well.
• Clutter
  Your site includes too many unnecessary widgets. For example, you use both MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog. Go with one or the other (I’d choose MyBlogLog as it is more popular).
• Header tags
  Your blog is not making proper use of header tags. Make sure you include the title of your post in h1 tags and all subheadings between h2 tags. Currently, your blog’s title is the universal h1 tag and h2 tags are only used for “Related Posts” and “Comments”. This is a huge missed opportunity in terms of optimization for keywords in the search engines.
• Javascript and CSS
  Put all Javascript and CSS in external files when possible. This will speed up the loading of your site and will help search engine spiders to more easily crawl your site.
• Your time stamp image is hard to read
  Your blue time stamp button is difficult to read. I think it would be better to use something text-based to make it more user friendly.
• Make use of your robots.txt file
  Your robots.txt file is currently empty. This file is important because it manages where on your site search engine spiders are allowed to crawl and index. This will help you to funnel pagerank to the most important parts of your site so they can rank higher for your desired search keywords. Make sure you use your robots.txt file to its maximum potential.

That’s it for now. Those should be more than enough to get you started in improving your blog. Good luck and add comments below if you have any questions. Thanks!