• Do you use categories?
• Do you use tags?
• Do you offer a full text search?

Are you satisfied having three different search result pages inside your blog?

Let's say we have a blog with 300+ articles, 1,000 tags, about 50 categories and some archive pages. And maybe you are linking to your internal full text search results via search links too. All those internal links are good for SEO.

But are three different search result pages a good approach to offer a valuable site search?

I say 'No' because your site and archive pages are transparent but not all (!) pages are mirrored in the results. Only specific parts of your site show up when doing a tag/category/full text search. I am not even talking about the valuable content inside the comments (like here on performancing.com) which normally is not indexed internally at all.

Let's introduce the web 1.0 'fuzzy search' box...

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• Do you hammer out your daily dose of blog posts?
• Are you and your readers satisfied with your blog format?
• Are your readers leaving your page after reading one page?

If the answer to the last question is a proud 'Yes Sir' then we have found a bunch of classical blog problems related to 'archive pages'.

• Visitors read the latest article and leave
• Visitors find a good article via search engine and leave

As the new performancing.com staff writer James Mowery pointed out in How To Make Your Previously Written Content Valuable Once Again there are good reasons to give your readers a lightning fast way to previously published great articles (Read: buried stone dead in the archives). Let's use a more generic and less performance consuming approach...

Social bookmarks are perfect for publishing...

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Do you have hundreds or even thousands of articles hiding behind those "previous" buttons on the bottom of your page? I bet that many of you do. They, unfortunately, offer little or no value to your readers. Valuable page views are being lost if you fail to make an honest attempt to promote past content.

Your living in la-la land if you believe that the typical reader is going to take the time to click the previous button on your blog over two or three times. I was once shocked to notice someone go back four pages on my technology blog, but even then I think it was one of my friends. It just doesn't seem right. I mean, after all, you invested so much time into those articles, and while your blog may be prospering with new readers that are reading what you write today, they are missing out on all your previous hard work. Something must be done about this!

Alright, So How Do We Fix It?

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