7 Important Features Every Blog Should Have

By Rahul Banker on January 3, 2011

There are almost 150 million blogs in the blogosphere as the stats given by blog pulse but still there is a diversity in designs, features etc. covering wide range of articles from across the world and every aspect of life. In spite of these vividness, you will still find some similarities in its features. These are some very common features which you might be aware already but still I am listing down them as it might come handy for newbie bloggers.

1. RSS Feeds

RSS feeds allows user to browse through your content and get the latest content deliver to them via email or any other RSS feed readers without having to visit your website daily or on a regular basis. It is a necessity to have RSS feeds for your blog. You can check out my RSS Feeds by this link and subscribe to them if you like it.

2. Contact Page

Contact page allows the visitor to contact you the easiest way. Readers are able to reach you the easy way if they have any questions, queries or they need further assistance. Contact page also helps advertisers to contact you and it also adds a human element to a blog. You can use Fast and secure contact form plugin or contact form 7 to create nice contact form for you to use it on your blog or you can provide your email on the page as well. Check out my Contact page.

3. Archives

Normally, a blog displays new articles on your homepage but some of your visitors might be looking for a reference to your old articles and this is when your Archives page comes handy for them to easily navigate or browse through your old articles and have a glance about your blog.

4. Comment System

Well, this is not one of the must have feature but as you know, default comment system of WordPress does not have those great features as the other commenting system like IntenseDebate, Disqus does have so to add more functionality to the commenting system, a comment system is must which allows users to engage with your blog in a proper way.

5. Protection Against Comment Spam

If you are having a do follow in comment area, there are high chances that your blog will be attacked by comment spammers on a regular basis and this is what you should really take care of as it also passes link juice to the link a spam comment contains which can harm your SEO rankings.

6. Social Media Integration

This feature helps readers easily share your blog posts amongst different social networking and it also helps you make your articles go viral and attract more visitors. Most of the services have their own bookmarking buttons which you can take help of to beautify your page.

7. Search Form

Besides archive page, this is also a feature which a readers look for on a page when they are really in need of one of your older post and need a quick way to find it. The search page on the page helps them to quickly navigate through the article by keywords they are searching for or a particular article they want to navigate to.

So, these were the features which you must include when creating your blog design and if you are still not sure about that, check out the list of top 100 blogs in directories like Alexa or Technorati and you will see the similarity between them. Do you find any other feature which a blog should have?