4 Tips for Organizing And Uncluttering your Blog Archive

A guest post contributed by George Baker, who regularly writes for SparesNextDay.co.uk

A well organized blog has a tone of respectability as well as being easy for your followers to search through for their favorite articles. Unfortunately, many bloggers let their blog devolve into a mess of discombobulated pieces. In the name of creating order out of the chaos that is far too many blogs, here are my top 10 tips for organizing your blog archive.

1. Use Pages on Your Blog

The most important thing that you can do to improve the fluidity of your blog experience is to add pages. Pages make it much easier to find what people are looking for. Pages don't get lost in the infinite black hole that is an archive; instead, you can put them anywhere you want on your homepage and, actually, on every page within your blog. This means that pages are always vying for attention and will, as a result, get that attention.

2. Use Pages on Your Blog Well

Just having pages doesn't mean that your blog is automatically well organized. It takes work and the intelligent, calculated use of pages. Don't have too many pages and make sure that the information entombed in your pages remains relevant, easy to navigate, and aids, rather than hinders, the organizational process. What this means is that your pages should closely cluster blog posts from related topics.

Think of pages as a tent that you invite a party to discuss a relevant topic; the party is a bunch of like-minded people getting together to make points around a topic or two, but if you invite too many people with opinions that are way out there or have nothing to do with your topic, then the party quickly degenerates into a bunch of arguing back and forth or, worse, inane statements and meaninglessness. You must have vital connections and a vital discourse withing the page. Therefore, group your pages precisely and according to definable topics.

3. Group Posts According to Categories

Pages are nothing without categories. Categories and sub-categories are how you define what a post is about. The most important thing with categories is to find, with each and every blog post, just what it is about and label it accurately. Otherwise, there is not only misdirection but a cornucopia of information. Contrary to popular belief, more information is not automatically better information. Better organized information is better information.

Don't categorize every single blog post independent of all your other blog posts. Find common ground and cut down on excess categories. By cutting down on over-categorizing, you can simplify not only your life (because you are the one who has to fit blog posts into categories) but your blog reader's lives. This is because it makes finding what they are looking for a breeze. Nothing deters curious readers than having to pick their way through an endless, dark labyrinth without so much as a map. Categories are the map. Give your readers a readable and understandable map, with a good legend and a clear key. They aren't looking for bewilderment and chaos; they are looking for a blog! Give them a blog. Otherwise, it is highly likely that they will no longer be your reader.

4. Legitimize your Blog with Linked Sources

Far too much of blogging is nothing more than opinion and pure fluff. The surefire way to counter this is to include your sources. If you have been writing about the economy, throw in a link to an online Wall Street Journal article that talks about either what you have been talking about or something similar. If you get some information from another website, link to that website. If you liked an idea from another blog, don't try to pass it off as your own; link to that blog and build a virtual friendship.

Also, by including links to authoritative and interesting articles outside of your blog, you broaden the minds of your readers by giving them another view on whatever topic you were writing about. Sincere and intelligent readers will treasure the additional information and meaning that you have made possible. Plus, this helps to improve the collective consciousness of our planet. What can be more important than that?

Image credits: activerain.com

Help out with all the vacuum cleaner bags at work is what George is trained to do, as he mainly deals Numatic vacuum bags.

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14 comments

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Reza Winandar

May 14, 2011 5:12 AM delete

Well, using categories and tags are important, but creating many synchronized pages is the hardest thing

Hemanth Kumar

May 14, 2011 2:47 PM delete

It is great post and thanks for providing detailed information

John Paul

May 15, 2011 9:21 AM delete

Thanks for this great Article DS, I want to know how to put ads or any another gadgets above the commentbox. Please help me ASAP regarding,
Waiting for a quick reply from you

Thanks.
John Paul

Sai - Blogger Widgets

May 15, 2011 9:28 AM delete

@John,

Click on "Expand widget templates" and find this code in your template:
<data:post.body/>

And just below it, paste the code for the widget.
To add a multi-tabbed widget, just like in this blog, follow this tutorial:
http://bloggerstop.net/2009/12/collapsible-multi-tabber-widget-for.html
(Check out the part-2 too)

May 15, 2011 2:57 PM delete

Thank you DS Thanks for your quick reply, you make me really glad, you are the best blogger in the world. hugs

THANKS

Bali Bras

July 04, 2011 8:53 AM delete

Very helpful tips. I need this because my blog site needs a little organization and this will help me. Thanks!

Olawale Daniel

July 29, 2011 3:35 AM delete

When it comes to arranging our blog very well to make it easy for our readers to read and be able to navigate to other area on the site, this blog post has said it all. I really appreciate the ideas that George shared in this post. Thanks a lot for the information and hope to read more from you here

Gokul G

September 01, 2011 2:10 AM delete

hey please help me,my blogs readmore option shows in my other pages also ,i need other pages with full post plaease help me ..

Anonymong

September 10, 2011 2:50 PM delete

Another way of course is simply not to write a single blog post for months at a time.

Dude, are you dead, or something?

Rack Mount Monitor

September 29, 2011 1:39 AM delete

Thanks for the tips… I agree with all your points specially limiting the number of categories, I have seen blogs with so many categories , sometimes its very irritating and boring to go through that blog.