Fine, you have been blogging for long. You have been posting content on a daily basis or say at least 3 posts a week. And you feel comfortable with it. You are also happy with the fact that you blog is getting popular now. This is evident from the the traffic that your blog has been drawing offlate. You feel contented with the fact that people are reading your blog. With each new post you publish, you feel an increase in your visitors. Yes, slowly but surely it pays off.

But have you ever thought of the fact that your once your blog gets old or lets say, when your blogs has more than 100 posts, its really very difficult to find visitors for your old archive. I mean leaving your posts on the homepage which gets updated regularly, do you find it easy to get others reading your old posts which are buried deep inside your blog archive? No, you don't. Your old archive often gets ignored leaving it least exposed in the times to come.

So, Is there any solution to it? Yes, there is one solution. And the solution is "Sneeze Page" Now what is this sneeze page and how is it useful? Well, a sneeze page is a page created purposefully to force people in different directions deep inside your blog by highlighting a variety of previously written posts. There are various ways in which you can create a sneeze page. Let us look at some of the types 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.
Now, how are sneeze pages useful? Sneeze Pages are useful in the following ways -
  • More and Better Exposure to your Old Posts - This is what sneeze pages do the best for your blogs. Such pages expose your old posts to your visitors and thus make them stay longer on your blog which is always a plus.

  • SEO Benefit - Once you link to your older posts, your blog SEO gets instant boost. This is so because its not only your blog's backlinks which matter to search engines. Internal linking does matter a lot. You should always try to link to our old posts. It really pays off later in the form of good ranking in the search engines.

  • Better Readership and Loyalty - Yes, it has been seen that if your blog has more great posts on it then chances of gaining returning visitors increases in leaps and bounds. So, as a blogger you should make sure that you are highlighting your top previous or old top posts on your homepage through sneeze pages. It will surely help you out in gaining more loyal visitors to your blog.
So, these were the 3, obviously top 3 reasons why you should pay attention to the sneeze pages. One important point. Just creating sneeze pages won't be enough. You should do every bit from your side to promote it and position it in such a way that it gets highlighted on your blog. In other words, people should really see it on your blog otherwise it would be a waste effort. One way to make it more highlighted is by linking to it from the navigation menu, sidebar or other hot spots on your blog. Try it.

Hope you got some good information about sneeze pages. I am planning to create it very soon on my blog and I hope you too are..