Most blogs today are in reverse chronological order and most hosted blog sites dont offer a fast way to find your own articles so you typically have to scroll through your pages to find something.

If youre prolific with your blogging, it can take no time at all to find yourself with several pages of blog entries. Do you If you find yourself scrolling on a regular basis though your blog to find specific entries for linking purposes? A blog index can help you organize your blog for others and for yourself.

Use your blog to showcase your work! If you're a freelance writer, you can create one big clickable blog entry that helps you showcase your best blogging work to others. You can also use this to help you when you write new entries because instead of scrolling and searching, all your URLs are in one spot. This is ideal whether or not you have a niche blog. You can categorize by types of entries, by dates, etc.

It took me quite some time to make my first index and I now need to remind myself every few weeks to update it with my new entries. Keeping a copy of my index on my hard drive is something I do too just in case my blog happens to have any technical problems (Ive heard of people having entries disappear never to be seen again.)

To create your index, you need to open a WordPad. I recommend WordPad over MS Word because your formatting can be lost in rich text format. It's also a good idea to write it in wordpad becuase it takes a lot of work and if you lose it by writing it directly to your blog, you'll be mighty frustrated!

Heres an easy way to create an index of your own:

Open your blog and be prepared to cut and paste all your urls for each blog entry that you want in your index. You can pick and choose which blog entries you want in your index.

After youve got all your addresses, you need to write html code in order to create a clickable index page.

HTML isnt complex in this case and if you have a large blog, I guarantee that by the time youve added a dozen or so links, youll have the code memorized.

For illustration purposes Im using (in place of the bracket < and ) in place of the bracket >.

Code:

(A href="http://www.danaprince.blogspot.com")Dana Prince(/a) After the URL address the )Dana Prince refers to what your users will see as the title for the blog entry. The address is embedded in that information and the (/a) closes the link.

Another example: (a href="http://www.yourblog.com/")blogtitle (/a)

Feel free to dress up your index with headings, subheadings as well as bolds, underlines and italics. If youre advanced, you can even insert images and colour into your blog index.

The finished result will be a big linkable advertisement for your blog and I use mine often.

Dont forget to bookmark your index so you can refer to it often and that way it wont become buried and difficult to find in your blog.

Happy Indexing.