Increase Your Blog's Audience With Post Pages

If you're looking for easy ways to boost your blog's readership, one of the easiest may be just a couple clicks away. I'm talking about the ability to create "post pages," which simply means that each blog post you create will exist as its own stand-alone web page. But you'll need to make sure you're taking advantage of this feature in whatever blog software you use.

In Blogger, for example, blogs don't automatically come with post pages enabled. In a blog without post pages, the posts are strung together on the main blog page and in the archive pages, but can't be accessed individually through their own URLs. To give each post its own URL and web page, you'll need to click the Settings tab and then go to the Archiving settings. Here you should see an option called "Enable Post Pages." Select "Yes" from the pulldown menu and republish your blog, and each post will then have its very own web page. Using this post as an example, scroll down to the bottom and click the link where it says "10:57 AM". See how it brings up a separate page? Every post on this blog has the same time-stamped link at the bottom, which leads to its own web page.

What are the advantages of post pages? Well, one of the biggest ones is that they increase your blog's search engine exposure. When a search engine like Google crawls through your blog, it will find each of those post pages and index them separately in its search results. So when someone searches for the subject of that particular post, there's a good chance they'll find it in their search results. On the other hand, if the post doesn't have its own URL and web page, there's not a subject-specific page for the search engine to direct them to, so the blog is less likely to appear in those search results.

Another advantage of post pages is that it's easy to copy and paste their URLs into an email. If you want to show a friend only a specific post from your blog, having a handy URL to drop into an email makes it very easy.

Are there any disadvantages to post pages? Ummm....none that I can think of. So make sure they're switched on and get ready to attract some new readers!