Get the most out of your sidebars.

Are sidebars even relevant in the age of minimal design and mobile browsers?

Sidebars are an excellent way to focus your visitors attention on important stuff in your content. It is a better way to focus attention on the relevant information in your page. Using targeted content in your sidebar makes sure your visitors notice it.

Most themes have one or two sidebars used to provide visitors information about your website. WordPress provides a bunch of standard widgets you can use in your sidebars. Plugins you add to your site may add additional widgets.

Sidebars are a blank canvas with infinite possibilities, so it is very easy to mess them up. Sidebars are not a place to stuff all the random information you don’t know where else to put.

Sidebars are a place to highlight the important stuff in your website.



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Chrissies Premium
That is really useful training Bill, many thanks.
Sidebars were an unchartered country for me!! :)
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bill808 Premium Plus
for me too! I learned so much just doing the research and writing up my notes.
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Chrissies Premium
Its such a great feeling every time we learn to do something new, isn't it ? :)
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SadieChan Premium
Thanks Bill for the great training. Any suggestions as to how many affiliate links should I place either on the sidebars and main post. How many is too much? But it is so little compared to most E-commerce site? Regards Sadie.
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DIAB Premium
Actually, in Kyles' training, he told us that Google penalizes the websites that have affiliated links all over. His example was to make a review for a product and then link from there to the affiliate page. Of course, you may choose to do it in other way.
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SadieChan Premium
Yes. Probably the only way if you want to get ranking by Google. Sadie
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bill808 Premium Plus
I think he also said to have a link page as I described. That way only one page gets penalized. Also, I've read that it is good practice to activate nofollow for all external links. Certainly, I would nofollow any page that had a lot of links. I'm a little uncertain about NoFollow so I didn't mention it. Can anyone fill me in re NoFollow?
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bill808 Premium Plus
I activate NoFollow on my external links. Google doesn't tell us how many links is to many, but most folks seem to agree that one link is ok. I also read that side bar links should be limited to no more than 5. I think that is more a matter of focus than of SEO. Be careful about putting external links in content. You want people to read your article and not leave your website.
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SadieChan Premium
Alternatively, we can have an addon domain or another site with review page with mostly affiliate link, where we can link to them from the so call parent site. It does not matter whether that page gets rank or not. And in most cases we can do the Paid Ads on that site as well. Regards Sadie
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johnwnewman Premium
Great training! Thanks :-)
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GolfSpecialt Premium
I'm just getting to the point in my training where this is very timely information. Thanks.
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Mac01 Premium
Great training, Bill, it's definitely a good pertinent topic. Liked, liked, and saved to favourites!
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