The major issue bloggers face is that over time their blog archives gets fill up with thousands of posts and by default a blog normally only shows the most recent posts that you have posted on the front page while the majority of your previously written posts can’t get noticed once they drop off the front page.

The new technique is called Sneeze Page. The idea behind it is simple – to create a page that forces the people in different directions deep inside your blog by highlighting a variety of previously written posts.

In simple words – A sneeze page is all about exposing those archives.

There are many types of Sneeze Pages that you can create on your blog. Few types are explained below.

Themed Sneeze Pages – these are posts or pages on your blog or site that revolve around a single theme. The sneeze pages (and others) are linked to prominently around the blog – including the ‘best of blogs’ section of the front page, if you have. These pages generate a lot of page views both themselves and the pages that they link to.

Time Related Sneeze Pages – these pages are based around a defined period of time. They are usually a ‘best of’ post that highlight your key posts from that period to either remind readers of previous posts that they might want to revisit or to highlight posts that they might have missed.

The period of time that you choose can really be anything from a year through to a month, week or even a weekend (ie a post that summarizes the posts from a weekend that those readers who don’t read your blog on a weekend might have missed).

Retro Sneeze Pages – Another variation of this ‘time related’ sneeze page is to do one that unashamedly shows off a number of posts from your blog from a particular point in its history. The most common way to do this is to do a post highlighting posts from the blog from a year ago.

Series Sneeze Pages – many bloggers use the technique of writing a series of blog posts that allow them to explore a topic over a period of time with lots of interlinked posts.

One key with writing a series of posts is to make sure that readers have a trail of links between posts so that they’ll not only read one but the full series.

A great way to help readers discover a full series is to develop a sneeze page. All of the posts in the series should link back to it and it links to them. Series Sneeze pages can become key pages on your blog.

Advantages of Sneeze Pages

Exposure to your archives – I don’t know about you but when I spend hours (if not days) crafting a blog post, I want people to read it! Sneeze pages lengthen the time that people interact with your older posts.

Benefits to SEO – search engines not only look at the links that other people make to your posts in order to give them ranking but the internal links on your blog. Linking to old posts can help them grow their search engine ranking.

Help’s create a Sticky Blog – I’ve not seen stats on this but it is my suspicion that a person arriving on your blog for the first time increases the chances of coming back to it the more great posts that they view on it. Get someone to read 10 great posts that you’ve written previously instead of 1 and you’ll exponentially increase the likelihood that they’ll subscribe and become a regular reader.

Sneeze pages can be an effective way of driving people deep within your blog – but they’ll only do that for as long as you’re able to drive people to the sneeze page itself. As a result – a sneeze page is something that you’ll want to promote and position prominently on your blog in a place that people will continue to see it.

Link your sneeze page from the navigation menu, sidebar or other hot spots on your blog. It works beautifully for both SEO and user experience purpose.

Posted under Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, SEO Tips

Sitemaps are well-known to most of the people as many websites put their sitemaps on their homepage. But, that who doesn’t know, a sitemap is a web page which contains a list of all the links or pages of a website under different categories and headings, same as an index of a book. Sitemap can be a great tool for making search engines crawl through your web site in a much more effective manner, in that ways helping you get more web pages indexed, and ultimately getting you more visitors. Particularly, when a search engine visits the site map page it gets to see all the links within that website and this enables it to crawl through those pages.

Sitemaps also help visitors to get a summary of the whole web site, and hence it is also a great navigational tool. It helps visitors find specific pages through a single page, for which they might have had to follow several links to reach the desired page. Below are some examples of well designed site maps.

http://www.google.com/sitemap.html

http://www.lycos.com/sitemap.asp

This leads us to the next question, i.e. how should site maps be designed. Designing a sitemap can be as simple as designing any other static pages without any pictures, graphics, etc. But all effort should be made to keep the structure logical and simple. It’s best to browse through the web, and check out a variety of sitemaps before you decide on what kind of structure you want to follow.

Important things you should keep in mind, before creating a site map.

Homepage Link: It is important to give a prominent link from the homepage to the sitemap page, so that visitors and search bots can easily hit the site map page. In fact, preferably there should be a link to the site map page from every page of your website.

Text Links: Plain text links should be used for all the links, as some search bots can have problems crawling through JavaScript.

Categories: It is important to organize the contents into well defined categories, and even sub-categories for easy navigation of the user. Although this doesn’t have direct SEO implications, it makes more sense to the user.

Descriptive Content: It is ideal to add some content describing the links, as search engines tend to ignore pages, full of links. It is also important to use your targeted keywords in your descriptive content as well as in your anchor text.

Anchor Text Link: It is important to use page titles as your anchor text, so that you can increase your anchor text back links. This is helpful for search engine optimization as it increases your link popularity.

However, websites with less than 20 pages or sites where most or all the pages have links directly from the home page generally don’t need a sitemap. Consider the above things before designing a sitemap; add a little effort and you’ll have a well-designed sitemap for the search engine spiders that will keep them happy and satisfied and that will help you get good ranking.

Posted under Search Engine Optimization