Blog archives are a standard feature of every blogging platform.
They can also be used to attract and maintain new and returning visitor traffic to your blog.
Some blogging systems offer categories, for placing archived posts under subject and topic headings.
Some blogging services like Blogger, which I use, do not.
Even with the categories available, a blogger can still take archiving one step further.
Including a "Best of Blog" page, posted and linked from the blog home page, can serve many valuable functions.
The list of the best posts helps the new and regular readers to find your very best posts and writing. Since all of you, who comprise my readers are excellent bloggers, finding great posts to include in your list, should be relatively easy.
New readers can learn more about you and your topic. Regular visitors can return to interesting and informative posts, or read ones that might have been missed previously.
Sort the posts into related sections for ease of navigation. By grouping the best posts together, a secondary category and classification system is created. This new selected topic listing, however, only includes your best writing and most useful information.
The selected posts will link to the page containing the orginally published writings. As a result, they will benefit from additional readers. They will also gain some internal linkage benefit, that will assist their rankings in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
New readers will read more posts than those that appear on the home page. Often, a visitor's first vist to a new blog will be from a link to a single posting. A best of blog grouping will help that person, to discover more reasons to return to your blog, again and again.
Providing a reader a strong reason to click beyond a single post or the home page is a solid step toward building a vast group of returning visitors.
On blogs lacking categories, and even those blogs where categories are an integral part of the templates, a new page should be created. One possibility is to develop a single post that includes all of your best articles and columns.
The number of ways to turn old posts into new readers is indeed unlimited.
Now, all we have to do is get started on those ideas.
Maybe I will do it someday too.
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