Reader experience is one of the most important factor which can make or break the whole blog and it’s important that the user experience of the readers should be good and that they should feel comfortable while reading the blog. It’s important to ensure that your blog shouldn’t irritate the readers and if you work on the following points then you’ll be able to provide a better user experience to the users :

1. Clutter free design : If you’ve got a clutter free design then you are going to surely attract the visitors more towards your blog. A good & unique design also helps in building the brand.

2. Fast loading pages : Keep javascripts, tracking scripts, flash widgets, images to the minimum in the blog posts and that helps in quick loading of the web page and that definitely improves the user experience. Consider yourself in this situation, if you were given to access two webpages with same content quality and in that one page loads fast and the other slow then which one will you prefer more.

3. Make the content readable : Typography is really important for any website. A blog with good typography will give better experience to the readers as they’ll be able to read the content without stressing their eyes. So, it’s really important to focus on the font selection, text size and the spacing. This can vastly improve the reading experience and give much comfort to the eyes of the readers.

4. Outgoing links directed to inner pages : If you are putting a link to a particular service and instead of putting their direct link, you put the link to one of the older posts or the tag link then it comes as the negative in the readers mind. The simple fact is that people prefer to reach the destination in one click on not two or three clicks.

5. Over stuffing of advertisements : I’m sure that you must have visited lot of webpages and if you see a webpage with lot of ads inserted right in the text then you would have got frustrated with it. The reason is simple, your main aim is to read the content and not read the ads. However, the correct placements of ads will definitely give you better click through ratio and will certainly give a better experience to the reader as well.

6. Background Music : There are webpages which tend to play music in the background. It’s far too bugging than anything else. There is no point of forcing a user to listen to some music which you like, not everyone may have same taste of music as yours. Not only that, it also increases the page loading time and that leaves a negative impression in the readers mind.

7. Bad navigation : As mentioned above that every reader prefers to reach to the desired content with in 2-3 clicks and if at all they can’t do that then definitely you need to tweak the navigation links of your blogs. Use Tags, Categories and display them in the standard places as people are used to standard surfing habits.

8. No search box : There can’t be anything irritating than not having a search box on your blog. If a user is interested in a particular post and faintly remember the content then he/she can reach to that post by making a quick search on your blog, however if they have to visit Google for that then most likely you’ve lost a possible reader.

The best way to find out that what will irritate your blog readers and that how you can improve the reading experience of the readers is to put yourself in their shoes. Surf various blogs and try to find out that what you liked while reading and navigating through those blogs and you’ll be able to improve your blog tremendously.