Thanks @rshahbaz for submitting your blog http://www.ranashahbaz.com/ for review on SME. I hope you find my various notes helpful!

Design Notes

I like the design – it definitely looks focused on conversions for your Internet Marketing School and mailing list. I think I would shrink the whitespace around the main banner on the homepage so that people could see the blog content faster.

In the sidebar, is it possible to get each listing in popular posts to take up less space? It’s a long way down before you can get to the ad or the Genesis link.

On your about page, could you move up the part about you, then go into the part about the blog?

And at the end of blog posts, have you considered adding an author box? Even if it is just you writing on your site, it might be faster for people to learn more about you at the end of the post vs. scrolling to the footer of the site.

Social Notes

Social looks good with post sharing options and options to follow you on Twitter and Facebook.

SEO Notes

Your homepage title is currently 125 characters. The maxium number of characters for an SEO title is 70 – anything after that is usually cut off. You can see what I mean in this screenshot of your site in search.

I would suggest modifying your title to something like this.

Rana Shahbaz – Internet Marketing Consultant – Social Media Marketing

Then for the meta description, maybe:

Rana Shahbaz helps small businesses create online visibility, build authority, and generate leads using the power of online and social media marketing.

It looks like you’re using meta descriptions well on your posts – definitely keep that up!

Content Notes

You have great content on your blog. The one teensy thing I noticed was in the latest post – http://www.ranashahbaz.com/social-media-manager – I think your dashes are coming up as some kind of special symbol (an equal sign with a slash through it).

Notes from the Audience

Now I invite everyone here on the SME forums to add your suggestions (or feel free to agree / disagree with mine). Please add constructive feedback and suggestions. This series is to help people improve their blogs, not to have their blogs roasted Comedy Central style.

@kristi-hines Thank you so much for taking time to review my blog. It means a lot. 

I will definitely update the blog as per suggestion. 
1. Regarding popular posts I am looking for a plugin like this: http://screencast.com/t/bW6mhQZT . If you know the plugin it will be helpful. 
2. I am totally with you regarding the main banner size on the home page. Actually I am just testing this, I know at this when you land on my home page you cannot see the latest title even because I know most people land on my blog through single post pages not via the home page.
Currently it’s working good.
3. I was using the author bio, just removed it few days ago to clean up the space at the end of each post. Whole point of doing that was to make it easy for people to comment. Plus, this is my personal blog and I thought as long as I have my bio info on the side bar (Need to add bio in the sidebar) It can be a good idea to free up some space at the end of each post. 
What do you think? 
4. I could not get this point: 
“The one teensy thing I noticed was in the latest post – http://www.ranashahbaz.com/social-media-manager – I think your dashes are coming up as some kind of special symbol (an equal sign with a slash through it). “
Do you mean dashes which are appearing in this url: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/clubs/blogging/forum/topic/blog-review-6-rana-shahbaz/ 
are different than my latest post? 
I haven’t changed anything, if it’s the case how can I sort this out? 
Once again thank you so much for taking time to review my blog and liking my Facebook page as an extra bonus
Friendly Regards
Rana

@rshahbaz I quite like the colour scheme and the layout. spacious….. I am not really one to be judging another person’s work as I am really new to this, I was just stating what I felt when I looked at the site…. ‘comfortable to look at’ haha (you can see now why I am not a paid blog consultant) Have a great weekend.!!

@rshahbaz I’m pretty sure Neil has something custom, but there are two plugins that create tabs based on popular content:   http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/popular-widget/screenshots/ and http://www.woothemes.com/woodojo/ (Woodojo Tabs). 

As far as the dash thing, this is what I see in Google Chrome.

Not sure I’ve seen it before – do you paste your posts from another program into WordPress? That could be the cause. 

@rshahbaz I’m not sure how to fix it – it does show up like that in all browsers on my PC – Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. It could be the text editor you use – I use a basic text editor that strips out formatting so you just have the raw whatever you see is what you will get on WordPress. Sometimes other programs have special formatting (like how Word autocorrects to a longer dash) that translates differently on WordPress.

@rshahbaz For nerdy people like me who know what it means, it essentially says something does not equal something. Just saw ≠ in a presentation today where they were trying to say that just because you do something doesn’t always equal the results you want.