Fairy Blog Mother
One client asked me whether she should have additional pages added to her blog in order to house archives of the posts she had written. She had visualised doing this manually every time she posted.
Both kinds of blog
I reassured her that this was done automatically, and far more extensively than she had imagined. This is where categories and tags come into play (see my e-course ‘Creating tags and categories’ to find out more) as these are the preliminaries to archiving your posts. Categories are the topics your posts are allocated to, and tags are the keywords used to focus the search engines onto your posts.
But let’s start at the beginning. Every time you write a post, it is published straight onto the main blog post page, which acts like a news roll with the newest post positioned at the top:
Here is the previous blog post I published to this one. The URL for my news roll page is http://fairyblogmother.co.uk/blog/ (because I have a separate homepage):
But if you click on the headline of that post, you will find that it has its own separate page:
And URL (http://fairyblogmother.co.uk/5-top-tips-for-a-successful-post/):
You may have noticed that the page title is different from the post’s headline, as that is the result of using the ‘All-in-one-SEO-pack’ plug-in which allows you to create more appropriate page titles for SEO purposes than your post’s headline.
Now, if you have read my ‘Creating tags and categories’ e-course, you will understand the importance of allocating your post to appropriate categories and relevant tags:
The bottom of each post lists which categories I have selected, and you will see they are live links. They are also listed in their separate widget in the sidebar. Click on any of the categories used (in this case Increasing Business Visibility) and you will see a separate page that contains the post:
and its allocated category URL: http://fairyblogmother.co.uk/category/visibility/
and page title Increasing Business Visibility | Fairy Blog Mother.
The same goes for the tags:
These tags are listed at the bottom of their allocated post, and listed in a ‘cloud’ within their respective widget on the sidebar. You can see that the most frequently used tags are larger than the others.
Let’s look at the tag ‘Keywords for SEO purposes’ that I chose for that post, and the page URL and title automatically created:
Note the /tag/ in between the URL and the tag name.
But it doesn’t stop there. There is an additional widget on my sidebar that shows my archives allocated to each month I post:
I have opted for the pull down menu which shows each month and the number of posts I have published. There is a separate page for each month with its own URL (http://fairyblogmother.co.uk/2010/05/ for May) and page title:
So for each post, there is a total of five pages it is allocated to once it is published. None of these are obvious, but the links are there at the bottom of the posts or within the widgets on the sidebar. And it’s a good thing it is automatic – could you imagine having to do all this by hand?
