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Putting Archives to Good Use

September 18, 2008 · Blogging, Search Engine Optimization · 331 views ·

By reading the title you are probably thinking “What good are archives?” I used to think the same thing. However, in the last few months I have been looking through many of the top blogger’s archives. In this time I have learned many things, including how archives should look.

Help the Readers

Many readers like to read through a blog’s old posts. They find that this is a good way of learning the quality of the blog and its content. It is a very good idea to provide easy access to all the posts through your archive, here are some examples of how this is done to a high level. I am sorry for the large images.

The ProBlogger archives are my favourite that I have seen so far. The timeline is the first element of the archive, this makes it easy to find posts if you know when they were written. But failing that, it lists all of the categories and the latest posts within them. The way Darren Rowse has organised the archive is very precise and was worth it.

Another way of organising an archive is like InfectedByBugs “All Posts”, which works identical to a archive. Unlike Problogger, IBB does not have any way of searching through the posts other than the normal search function. However, it lists all the posts on one page, which for some people would be more useful than searching through ProBlogger’s archives.

Help Yourself

Now, you must be wondering how a well organised archive can help you. It is actually very simple, an archive acts very much like a link directory or a site map of a blog. This allows both readers and search engines alike to find other posts easily.

I am not sure which style of archieve I prefer, ProBlogger’s looks better but Infected By Bugs is much easier to use. What style do you have/prefer?