Blog Design: Making the most out of your footer space

The footer (the very end of your blog) is a very impor­tant place of infor­ma­tion on your blog. Your footer can hold a vari­ety of infor­ma­tion, such as copy­rights, links, ads, and a lot of other stuff. The footer is also impor­tant SEO wise for a lot of rea­sons. Rea­sons I will cover in this post.

The point of this arti­cle is to help you ana­lyze your footer and make the best out of it. I can’t stress enough how impor­tant it is (you will see why as you read on), and you need to uti­lize it to it’s max­i­mum poten­tial so you can get all of the ben­e­fits of hav­ing a great footer.

There are two types of foot­ers you can have on your blog.

Small Foot­ers

“Small foot­ers” usu­ally keep it clean and sim­ple by just includ­ing copy­right text, and maybe a few links here and there. Doesn’t hold a lot of infor­ma­tion, but foot­ers don’t always have to have a lot of infor­ma­tion. There is noth­ing wrong with hav­ing a small footer on your blog either.

Large Foot­ers

Often referred to as “web 2.0 foot­ers”, these foot­ers con­tain a lot more infor­ma­tion than smaller foot­ers. They can still hold copy­rights, but com­mon things to see in larger foot­ers on blogs are more links, and even con­tent. Blo­gus­sion has what could be con­sid­ered a big footer, so just check out what we have in there for a bet­ter exam­ple of what “large foot­ers” are.

There is noth­ing wrong with hav­ing either footer. Some pre­fer a large footer, oth­ers smaller. In my per­sonal opin­ion, it is best to have large foot­ers on web­sites with a lot of con­tent (a blog) because it can help you orga­nize con­tent into more areas than just the sidebar.

How a Large Footer can help you SEO wise

I’ve men­tioned it before above, the footer can be a great area in your site to do some SEO (Search Engine Opti­miza­tion) work. Now, hav­ing a large footer really puts you at an advan­tage SEO wise because of all the con­tent you can put into it. I’m not an expert by any means on SEO, but I have been around long enough to under­stand and use the tech­niques I am about to list below and use them on all of my websites.

Key­words, key­words, keywords

Your footer should have some of the key­words you want to rank for in the SERP’s (Search Engine Rank­ing Posi­tion). When you do put your key­words in the footer, try to link to them. You should try to link to it because when a search engine spi­der goes to crawl your web­site, it will see your key­word linked to a page, and that page will be ranked for that key­word. It will become more rec­og­niz­able to the web, thus boost­ing your SERP for that key­word. I hope you under­stood that, because like I said — I’m no expert.

One thing to be care­ful about is key­word stuff­ing. That’s when you put too many key­words on a page, and even some key­words that are unre­lated to the page. It is seen as abuse by search engines, and you can be penal­ized for that. So be care­ful to choose just a few key­words you want to rank high for, put them to good use in your footer, and hope for the best.

The footer can be used to link to other pages

You can use your footer to link to other pages on your web­site that may be harder for search spi­ders, or even humans to see. You want search spiders/crawlers to see them because they can crawl the page and index it and you can start rank­ing in the SERP’s for that page. You also want your human vis­i­tors to see it as well because it increases the chances of them link­ing to it on another site.

Some content/links you should include in your footer and why it can help you:

• Most Pop­u­lar Posts - Your pop­u­lar posts are your “pil­lar arti­cles”, they need as most expo­sure as they can. So by hav­ing a link to your top posts on every page of the site, they will be undoubt­edly seen by search engine spi­ders to get crawled and human vis­i­tors to link to.
• Links to pages - You should link to your pages (about page, con­tact, etc.) for extra vis­i­bil­ity. Also, if you use images as nav­i­ga­tion, search engine spi­ders will not be able to crawl them. So it is a good idea to put any pages masked by an image in your nav­i­ga­tion in your footer (in link form) for the spi­ders to get to it.


Search Engines would not be able to get to these pages unless we put them in link form. We did so in the footer so they could get crawled.

• Side­blog, About Me, etc.- Hav­ing a lit­tle writ­ten text in your footer cer­tainly won’t hurt you. You can post a lit­tle side­blog (or would be called a “foot­blog” in this case?). Even a lit­tle about me sec­tion could go there too. Just make sure you link to your about page!
• Blogroll - Send your friends some link juice. Peo­ple appre­ci­ate get­ting linked to, and what’s bet­ter than get­ting a sitewide link? This is a great way to build rela­tion­ships with other peo­ple, and with build­ing rela­tion­ships in the blo­gos­phere comes get­ting linked to.

Don’t feel bad for using a small footer — you can still reap some SEO benefits

With a small footer, you do lose some of the advan­tages from ans SEO stand point because you only include a min­i­mal amount of infor­ma­tion. What is usu­ally expected in a smaller footer are copy­right notices, and links/keywords. There’s no rea­son to switch to a larger footer unless you are really going to make the best of it. But, there’s always ways to make your footer larger and get some of those extra SEO ben­e­fits.

Mak­ing your footer look great design wise

Let’s step away a lit­tle bit from all of that SEO mumbo jumbo and talk about a thing I have more expe­ri­ence in talk­ing about: design.

Now, I don’t think it’s expected of you to have a really breath tak­ing footer design. You don’t want to make it too busy with all of these crazy designs around it, because you run the risk of los­ing read­abil­ity in your footer (and that’s NOT good for your most impor­tant vis­i­tors — your human readers!).

The one thing you want to take extra spe­cial care of in styling your footer is:

Read­abil­ity

Like I said, you need to keep the footer infor­ma­tion clean and easy to read. If it’s a link, a spi­der can get to it. But, it doesn’t always mean the same thing for the human vis­i­tor. If you have to add flashy graph­ics or styling to your footer, either do it where it has a lot of con­trast between the text, or just keep it away from the text com­pletely. You should take a minute and think to your­self, what/who is more impor­tant. The humans, or the spiders?

Other things to take note of when design­ing your footer

• Large Foot­ers: Can the con­tent in it be changed eas­ily when you need to? You may decide you would rather have your pop­u­lar posts dis­played instead of your recent posts. It’s all in the code, and when you code you should always plan for the future.
• Small Foot­ers: Are you mak­ing sure the key­words you do have are being uti­lized to their high­est poten­tial? Choose the key­words you con­stantly use to describe your blog, and link to them in your footer (with what­ever space you do have).
• Large Foot­ers: You have so much space, you need to make sure you can fit your con­tent in while mak­ing it look good. Maybe add your site’s logo to the bot­tom, or some lit­tle graph­ics to fill in any blank space. While you should do this with­out com­pro­mis­ing the read­abil­ity. The footer is just as impor­tant as your header or con­tent area, and even though it is on the bot­tom of the page, it still needs to look good.
• Small & Large Foot­ers: Are you mak­ing the best out of your footer space? Is every­thing evenly spaced out, and eas­ily read? Can it be eas­ily read (read­abil­ity) and used as a go-to spot for some extra con­tent at all times?

So as you can see, just about every bul­let above really comes down to one thing over and over again: read­abil­ity. For­get SEO for a minute, and look at your footer. It has links, key­words, and all of that good SEO stuff. But is it really the eas­i­est thing to read?

I don’t want to leave this post with just a ques­tion at the end because I really think this is an impor­tant post. So with­out fur­ther ado, I want to show you my 6 favorite footer designs (3 large, 3 small). Look at them all so you can get an idea how you want to set up your footer.

Large Footer #1: PSDTUTS

PSDTUTS has the largest footer I have ever seen, but all the con­tent in it is per­fectly spaced, eas­ily read, and looks great while stay­ing effec­tive in get­ting all of the con­tent displayed.

Large Footer #2: RetireAt21

RetireAt21 has a bunch of links in it’s footer. Most links aren’t found any­where else on the site, so this site is a per­fect exam­ple of how you can put links in your footer while still look­ing good. [intlink id=“2146” type=“post”]Want to know more about RetireAt21? Read our review![/intlink]

Large Footer #3: DailySEOBlog

An SEO blog must know a thing or two about hav­ing a great footer? You bet Dai­l­y­SEOBlog does. It’s filled with great con­tent, and even has an about sec­tion for the blog. Check this one out for sure, you may get some ideas.

Small Footer #1: Blog Perfume

The whole footer is not shown in the lit­tle pic­ture above, but Blog Per­fume has a small footer with min­mal infor­ma­tion, but excel­lent exe­cu­tion. It has lit­tle graph­ics on each side of the footer to fill in that blank space I was talk­ing about earlier.

Small Footer #2: BittBox

A very sim­ple, but effec­tive footer here. They show some URL’s of their pages, as well as throw in a few key­words and a copy­right notice.

Small Footer #3: Smart Bloggerz

Even though the footer is unstyled, it still has some use­ful infor­ma­tion like how to sub­scribe to the RSS feed, sitemap, and also links to a key­word. Just goes to show you that it’s not always design that makes the footer, but what con­tent it holds.

I hope you enjoyed this mas­sive arti­cle. Good luck edit­ing your foot­ers!

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