Today I completed a huge phase in my blog design. I worked very long and hard on my individual post pages. For many reasons, I felt that is was very important to rework my individual post pages. In order to achieve the things I wanted, I had to create a separate template just for these pages. With WordPress, and commonly the case with most blogs… the home page, category pages, archive pages, tag pages and individual post pages all look the same. Now, the looks part I guess isn’t too bad; however, what has been a concern to me is the fact that all these sections have one thing in common: the links. Specifically, the sidebar.

Over the past few weeks, I have been paying close attention to how search engines crawl my blog. I have been paying attention to how often my blog is crawled, the number of pages that get crawled per visit, the length of time between visits as well the depth of each crawl (both internal and external depth). The new design for my individual post pages is a direct reflection on what I have learned over the last few weeks of studying the crawling behaviors of my blog. All in all, and to keep the explanation simple, references and links within my articles typically weren’t getting crawled and if they did get crawled it didn’t seem to hold much weight towards honoring any kind of credit to the source page I was linking to. An even easier way to explain it is that by the time my articles pages were crawled, the crawler typically ran out of gas before it finished following all the links in my article. The crawler would continue where it left off the next time it came back, which typically took about a week.

I don’t want that. My writing and articles are very important to me. The references and links included in my articles are also very important to me. If I provide references in my articles, not only do I want my readers to visit them, but I also want search engine crawlers to do so as well. That wasn’t happening quite the way I wanted it.

The template that I designed for my article pages present the article and the references and links within the article. My individual post pages are very closely controlled and the links within are put to the front of the line. When a crawler visits my article pages, it is almost guaranteed that every link will get crawled and accounted for. As this design change may come to a shock for you, please keep in mind that I am doing this for you. You can thank me the next time I write an article about your and mention and link to your ten most recent posts, 5 of most popular categories, and 12 of most used tag keywords in your blog. By reworking my individual post page, I can almost guarantee you that every link will get crawled on a crawlers first visit.

The individual post pages are very powerful. Everyday, my blog gets more incoming and direct hits to the individual posts than to the home page. My home page is very popular with regular readers and newly found readers who stumble in from other bloggers who link direct to my home page. However, the bulk of my daily traffic come from search engines that link direct to my hundreds of individual post pages. And by creating a template that harnesses this power, it should hopefully throw my blog into a higher PageRank. All in all, my redesign has been done for two reasons. One, to provide a better viewing experience for my readers and two, to provide a more powerful medium for allowing search engines to crawl and find high quality information for their index.