This a series of posts entitled the A to Z of Business Blogging which take a look at the some of the elements and benefits of company blogs or corporate blogs.

A is for Archives

A blog’s archives are effectively anywhere that posts are stored once they disappear from the blog’s front page. The two main areas which I consider as archive areas are the “Archives” themselves where the posts can be found according to the date they were published and “Categories” where the posts are kept according to the subject matter that they deal with. Both of these are organised so that they are easy to use for your readers and help posts to be easily indexed by the Search Engines – for both these reasons, they are very important.

The archives in a blog, whatever their format, are also particularly helpful to the author because they are self-organising – this allows us to focus on the posts and the message that we want to communicate rather than worry about the structuring of the blog. The Archives are usually organised by month (though some systems do so weekly) while we have control over the naming of the Categories. This of course allows us to include the main keywords that we wish to focus on as well as making them descriptive.

But don’t just leave it to the automatic archives to promote the posts that have disappeared from the front page – make sure that you promote your own posts from within your blog as well as encouraging other blogs to link to them as well. To help this:

• Highlight your most popular posts: make sure that the best or most popular posts you have written are not lost in your archives, so highlight them by linking from a separate page or from your sidebar. A “Top 10 of your Best Posts” is always going to get good results and encourage additional readers;


• Link to related posts: at the end of a post, link to other posts on your blog which cover similar topics which might interest them. You can do this automatically within Wordpress or manually with a little effort – but it’s well worthwhile;


• Write a Series: By writing a series of posts on a topic, you will have the opportunity to interlink all of the posts and so encourage your readers to make sure that they read all the posts in the series;


• Link from within posts: you should reference and link to your own posts as well as posts on other blogs or websites when you want to add weight to what you are writing about.

Whichever way you decide to go about it, use the blog’s archives to your own advantage for both readers and Search Engines alike. However, at the same time, make sure that you don’t leave your posts to simply disappear into your archives – work with your archives and keep the posts they contain as accessible and active as possible.

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Related posts:

1. Business Blog Design: Categories, Archives and Search
2. Business Blog Design: Navigation and using your Content
3. Blog Design Series – a Business perspective