People are attracted to blogs for the content matter contained therein. Do you need a sidebar on your blog ? The reason you have a blog is to offer information to your audience and allow them to engage with you by asking questions and giving their opinion in the comments section. If they like that content, they may opt to share it to their social media profiles 4web is webdesign and Development company in vadodara.
However, you don’t necessarily have to place a sidebar for social sharing, because there are share buttons that can be appended at the end of every post, or plugins such as Flare which can be used. So, why should you have a sidebar at all?
For starters, the sidebar can be used as a space for product or service promotion, and also to get the page visitors to take some particular action you want them to take. For instance, by including your author bio in the sidebar for all pages of the blog, you can increase readers’ connection with you. This in turns builds your community of loyal followers and is a good enough reason to include a sidebar.
Author bios can be added after the blog content in each post, sure, but remember that a good number of visitors won’t read through your post entirely, especially longer posts. You also cannot add it at the beginning since this distracts users from the main purpose of their visit – to devour content. They shouldn’t have to get through you to the content, that can be rather off-putting.
Sidebars are also necessary if you’re trying to attract repeat traffic. In your sidebar, you can include links to your social profile, as well as an invitation to subscribe for email. You may not consider it important, but the email can contribute to a significant chunk of traffic to your blog/site, making a sidebar completely necessary.
However, the best reason to include a sidebar is because it can contribute to better ranking on organic search engine results pages (SERPs). For instance, you can include links to your most recent and most popular posts. This passes traffic and internal link juice to listed pages, making them gain better ranking on Google.
When should you have a sidebar?
While it’s necessary to include a sidebar, you don’t have to place it on every page of the blog. It can be left out of your homepage, for instance, as well as any other page used to actively drive conversions. The reason is simple: you want your customers to fix their attention on the area that actually drives conversion and generates revenue. The sidebar can be distracting.
The same is true for all pages which have clearly defined goals. For instance, if you blog about how-to content, your aim is to get the reader to focus and read through the content piece from beginning to end. Hence, you eliminate the sidebar which could lead to a shift in focus. However, most blog posts can do with the sidebars. Only remove for pages that have specific goals and those which contribute to conversion.
Left side or right side?
Most people prefer having a sidebar on the right side because it looks better, but having it on the left side contributes to better conversions, according to research using a number of small SEO tools.
Placing a sidebar on the left, research has shown, results in more email subscriptions, exposes more people to your author bio and attracts more people towards whatever other promotional content you have. However, fewer people actually read through your actual content with a sidebar on the left.
Given this position, you must carefully consider whether or not it is beneficial to have a higher rate of email subscription and less interaction with actual content, or whether you are okay with fewer new subscriptions in exchange for better interactions with your content.
More often than not, it’s more important for you to engage and interact with users through the content of your posts, which is why most sites have sidebars on the right-hand side. This is because, where rubber meets the road, the main reason you opened a blog was to educate your readers through content shared – anything that takes away from that should be carefully assessed before being allowed to continue.
Sidebars on the right-hand side result in fewer conversions, but this is a secondary goal to your blog. Users are visiting your blog to benefit from your content, and therefore the main objective for your layout is to make it as easy as possible for those visitors to read through your content, engage with you about it and also share it on their social networks.
