Create a “Sneeze” or Hub Article Page – Day 18 of Build a Better Blog in 31 Days

Day 18 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog (affiliate) focuses on creating “sneeze pages” as Darren calls them. I love these. I call them index pages or hub articles because they serve as hubs from which you can drive traffic to several other areas of your site. For example, in the sidebar of this site I list popular posts or series like Ten Habits of Blogging Success.

By sending readers to this one page, they are able to access several other older posts they might otherwise have missed. Another great example of a post I did like this is Best Books for Preschool Educational Story Stretchers which rounds up two dozen individual story stretchers all in one place.

A hub page can show off your post archives around a specific theme. Sometimes a fabulous post gets buried by other, newer pieces and loses the limelight. This is a great way to highlight posts that are worthy of attention even after several weeks or months.

The SEO for a hub page is usually really good. Having a resource post usually gets lots of incoming links because it has a high value. And it can decrease your bounce rate by keeping people on your site longer.

You can do hub pages according to posts in a series, best of round ups from a time-frame, or centered around a specific theme. For example, I will probably create a post soon listing all the sites that writers can contribute to – just a list of links going to the more in-depth analysis of various websites I’ve written about here.

One thing that is recommended is to promote the hub pages or “sneeze pages” in prominent places on your blog. As part of this challenge, and with angengland.com growing much larger, I plan to clean up the sidebars on this blog a lot more and streamline the entire blog by adding additional hub articles.

Alright then – challenge time – Create a new “sneeze page” for your blog. 10 Tips for X, Y and Z. Best Ways to Blank. Resources for Whatchamacallits. You get the idea. 🙂