Photo by Flavio@Flickr
No one likes to lose things. We have all spent time looking through files to find that invoice, document, or article. The lady above seems to be missing her dog!
Did transitioning to paperless filing help?
Even electronic paperless processes have not eliminated the frustrations from losing things. People still hunt for receipts at tax time to complete their returns. Many people seem to be organizationally challenged.
What tools should I have to make my blog more searchable?
Take a look around this blog. Even though this is a brand new blog, I have set up systems to find specific topics when the content in the blog expands.
- Search box Headway makes this easy with the new search box built into the navigation bar up at the top. To use it, all you have to do is type in a term. I give my own search box located on the sidebar or workout almost every day as I use it to link to posts I write or to answer questions from clients.
- Recent Posts (and Popular Posts) Plug-ins There are a variety of plug-ins available for you. I recommend having both on your blog as it grows. The popular post plug-in pulls your most popular posts out and you can configure them to fit your time table. On this blog, I have individual plug-ins set up that pull posts into lists. On my other blog, I changed to a plug-in on the sidebar that combines both recent and popular into one area to save space. Yesterday, I changed the formula from 60 to 250 days to pull different posts. The number is arbitrary but I was looking for my online application post to share with a client and with 250 days, it floats to the top of the list.
- Categories Perhaps you have wondered why you see categories on so many blogs. This plug-in sorts your posts into organized lists of posts. I am still building the category list here but in the future it will be fully functional and searchable.
- Archives Did you wonder why bloggers put the archives on their blogs? Once again, this helps people find posts that were written awhile back. I probably use that search tool more than my readers. If I remember that I wrote a post in October, I can look at the October list and find it. One more tool to find your information.
You want your blog to be user-friendly and you want to be able to find your own posts, so you might check to make sure you have set some of these options up on your own blog. One of the most frustrating things for a regular reader is to not be able to find their favorite topic because it is buried in batches of posts written later.
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Hi Julie,
Personally, when I visit a new blog and want to have a dig around, I use categories. This allows me to focus on the areas I am most interested in.
Blog search boxes are often extremely effective too. I’m amazed how few people use them, when I look at the stats on my own blogs.
Thanks for an interesting post!
You are always welcome, Jim! I use my search box on my own blog ALL the time. It helps me find posts with just random keywords. I get frustrated when I hit any website without search boxes on them, blog or static site.
Thank you Julie for the post. I actually have all these tips you mentioned in place! Now onward toward building my readership
Just keep working on it, Mike and it will happen.
Having read this I believed it was extremely enlightening.
I appreciate you spending some time and effort to put this short article together.
I once again find myself personally spending a significant
amount of time both reading and leaving comments.
But so what, it was still worthwhile!