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I’ve been reading mashable.com for about 18 months now. In that time the blog has continually made minor updates and tweaks to improve performance, reader engagement and help SEO. Since Mashable is such a huge blog and has a large following, what better site to attempt to emulate in its build and functionality? Obviously this internet marketing blog is a much smaller scale, but there have been improvements made to Mashable that can be implemented on a much smaller scale. Below are a four features of Mashable, that I have incorporated into internetmarketingsource.net.
1. Article Linking
You’ll probably notice as you ready through posts on Mashable that the content links to other posts or categories with specific keywords. This is good practice for a few reasons, a. It helps readers navigate your site and learn about more topics relevant to the article they are reading, b. this in turn is good for SEO because it helps search engines find all pages on the site, and c. if these links are set as anchor links with relevant text used as the hyperlink, it further strengthens the SEO for the site since relative words are the actual link and terms like “click here” are not hyperlinked (which tells search engines nothing about the content that is linked to).
2. Share Button Usage
One piece I notice about Mashable is that they are constantly tweaking their share button organization and arrangement. They add the latest buttons that become available such and most recently, Google Plus. This provides readers with ample options for sharing content and thus encourages shares, regardless of which share platform the reader is familiar with.
3. Minimize Outbound Links
I’ve noticed that Mashable keeps outbound links to a minimum. Oftentimes, the site reviews an online service or website that requires linking to. They will usually only provide one link to this source within their content. This helps retain visitors on their actual site. With Mashable providing a lot of content and resources within its own platform, it is easy for them to link to their own content instead. It is important however, to make sure that you link up relative offsite resources too, you’ll be doing those external sites a favor and build rapport with these sites as well as your own readers. Sometimes I find that Mashable does not externally link enough. I have found it difficult to find the link to the new website or online product before.
4. Disqus Commenting
When I first installed my WordPress blog, I utilized the commenting system built in with the platform. While this works reasonably well, I found that it was susceptible to spam, which grew and grew and grew. I did install the captcha plugin, but that too began to be abused. In the past I had been reluctant to install something requiring registration to comment, through fear of losing engagement, but now the spam had made this a necessity. Mashable uses the Disqus platform and so do many other sites in my field. That said, I chose to use the same figuring that many of my audience will already have a Disqus account and would minimize the loss of engagement. Disqus also appeared to be a clean and robust platform. I was happy to find that by migrating to the Disqus commenting system, the plugin allowed for the transfer of all previous comments and reactions over to the new system #awesome.
There are many elements to a website these days, we’ve come along way from animated gifts and static html. I think we can all learn something from the successful websites out there, like mashable.com.
Which blogs or websites have you learned something from?
About Sam Beamond