As your blog gets bigger and the number of pages expand, sometimes it can be difficult for your readers to find information. We live in an instant world where people want everything at their fingertips. One of the best ways to help your readers is to have a well placed internal search option. There are other options.
Your past content should not be wasted, particularly if it is good and has been well received in the past. Some bloggers do a weekly recap where they summarize and link back to their best posts for the week. This can be quite helpful if you are prolific and write several posts each day.
If you are not quite so prolific then perhaps a monthly recap where you highlight the best posts for the month, again linking back to those posts, can be a great help to your readers, particularly those that are new. Of course these recap posts get syndicated out as well, with the internal links.
One of the most useful recap posts is where you dig back through your past archives and bring together related material as a recap. For a blog like ours, we could create a recap post on the best ‘blogging tips’ or the most commented on, or simply link together related tips. The recap post then links back to each post referred to.
There are two common threads to this blogging tip. One, you are using old information to create a new post whilst helping your readers find some of those older gems; and two, you are creating an internal linking structure and reminding the search engines of previous posts.
This is a simple blogging tip that can be of immense help to your readers. It can often be good to reduce bounce rates from the home page as readers click through to read older posts. Whilst you don’t have to think of new material to create these posts, don’t assume it will be a time saver. It can take a lot of work to find the best posts to use and then to craft together a useful post. However, you will find that over time readers will come to appreciate your recaps and the time its saves them.
