5 Widgets a Blog Must Have on the Sidebar

By Bryan Karl Yuson

It is stated in Google's guidelines that a clear and proper navigation and linking is one way for a blog to do good in search engine results and rankings. The sidebar is an area to practically place anything from links to humongous banners and any other thing that can be placed on that section. However, some blog owners just stuff their sidebars with any widget they encounter, not taking into consideration the ease by which their users could freely move on their blog and the usefulness/uselessness of such widgets. I am not suggesting the stripping down of your sidebars but I am openly suggesting a deeper look of the real reasons of why such widgets are there. And does your sidebar really deserve the presence of such widgets?

Here is a ranking of the Top 5 essential widgets a blog's sidebar must have. Reactions and suggestions are all welcome on the comments area. If your suggestions give very strong points, this entry will be updated to include yours.

Recent Posts - This is self-explanatory. For Blogger blogs, a Recent Posts widget is very important. If you want to advertise every post you make and want the new ones noticed fast, then their titles must appear right away on the sidebar through this widget. However, due to the "newspaper style" capacity of Wordpress blogs, a Recent Posts widget is not that needed there. A newspaper style could allow up to 10+ previews of posts still with the scrollbar long enough. In Blogger blogs, 10+ posts in the homepage could make the scrollbar so tiny your readers would easily bounce away from your blog.

Subscription Link or Form - Make your readers loyal with this widget. If your posts are interesting and useful enough (or has a high quality for short), then readers would want to be updated on the latest from your blogs. A subscription via RSS, a reader or e-mail is a convenient way for a reader to receive updates from you. Seeing a Subscription Link or Form could possibly entice readers to give it a try, or maybe seriously subscribe to your posts.

Popular Posts - A great way to endorse the best posts that you made, those that made it to the top in the search engine results and those that made the most number of comments. Well obviously this is not just to take pride of your blog but to serve your new readers the best of the best so they would enjoy your blog and subscribe after. Many blogs forget this part.

Labels or Tags - Even the most-specific-niched blog posts could be broken up into several tags. This is how this widget is of use, clearly categorizing each tags into clear and proper groupings so users would find it easy to reach posts that they are finding with a specific topic (or label). This is to make sure that readers finding about Paris would not end up reading about Japan.

Pages or Links to Internal Pages - Usually, this is where links to the Contact Me, About and Blogroll reside. These are just links but they point to very important pages on a blog. The Contact Me is very important as it promotes an interaction between blogger and reader. About is one of the most important internal pages that a blogger must not forget. Sometimes a reader would directly search for that page even before taking a look at your posts. A Blogroll page is optional.

Those 5 don't sound very special. Yes, but they are 100% essential. A blog is not a blog without those. Some blogs manage to get a huge amount of traffic even with one or more of those lacking because they offered another efficient way of linking out to their other post, and that is through a Sitemap or an Archives page. But with or without a Sitemap on its own page in the domain, those five still prove to be necessary to maintain a blog's health. Other widgets are optional and relative and it is up to the owner whether to place them or not.

Bryan Karl Yuson is author of two blogs. One is Bryan Karl dot Com Earning, Blogging, Tips and More and the other is Bryan Karl Everything Online. He is a student at the Philippines' national university taking up Computer Science.