For all of us who have had Blogger.com blogs for a long time and who never worried about "labels" before and who, with the conversion of our blogs to the new beta.blogger.com, now have the ability to add "labels" to our posts you're going to think what I'm about to say is "nuts."
Have I got you wondering what I'm going to say, yet?
Well, if you converted your old blogger.com blog to the new beta.blogger.com layout format or if you kept your old blogger.com template and just had your blog transferred to the new beta.blogger.com you should not only add labels to all your new posts going forward but, you should go backwards and add labels to your old posts.
I can already hear your response. You're going to say; "WHAT? ARE YOU CRAZY? ADD LABELS TO MY OLD POSTS? ARE YOU NUTS? THAT'S A LOT OF WORK!!!!"
Well, it is a lot of work, but I'm not nuts and here's why I think you should do this.
For those of you who have converted your old blogs to the new beta.blogger.com layout format you have the ability to not only label all your posts but, to have a column on the sidebar of your blog for all your labels. So, for all of you who wished for labels before but didn't understand the HTML coding to add them to the sidebars of your blogs before you can now have labels.
Since, labels make it so much easier for your blog readers to find your posts about subjects that they are interested in and since you want to keep your blog readers coming back you might want to consider spending the time to go backwards and add labels to all your old posts. That way, all your posts will show up when your blog readers click on that particular label in the sidebar or when they click on that label in your post.
Now, the latter statement is where all of the old blogger.com blogs that were transferred to the new beta.blogger.com but, who are choosing not to convert their templates to the new beta.blogger.com layout template, come in.
Even if you are still using your old template all of your posts now have the ability to have labels and, ALL OF THE LABELS ARE CLICKABLE AND WILL BRING UP THE ALL POSTS WITH THAT LABEL. If you kept your old template you don't have the ability to add the "label" box column to your sidebar, but you do have the ability to utilize labels. Every label added to a post becomes CLICKABLE and will bring up every post with that label. So, if you've wanted to utilize labels before but didn't know how you can do so now - even if you didn't convert your template.
Is it worth all the time to go backwards and re-label old posts. I think so as it makes it much easier for your blog readers to find all your posts about a particular subject and it helps with the search engines. Remember, search engines love to follow links. Labels, in essence, are links.
If you're like me and have hundreds of old posts going backwards will take time to do. Do it a little bit here and there, a few old posts at a time. You'd be surprised how quickly you can get this accomplished. And, make sure that going forward all of your posts are labelled.
Plus, in the "Edit Posts" menu of Beta.blogger.com there are a lot of new features that you can utilize for labels now.
You don't have to go into each individual post to add a label if you don't want to. You can add labels to specific posts you've checked "en masse" from the "Edit Posts" screen. Plus, you can CLICK on the labels listed in the left hand column and see what articles you have already posted and what "draft" articles contain that label. And, you can easily see what labels you've assigned to each post from the "Edit Posts" screen. Quite a few nice features for handling labels.
So, am I nuts? I don't think so.
Ask me again next summer when I'm finally finished labelling all the old posts from all my blogs.
Maybe I'll be singing a different tune.
Maybe, but, I doubt it.
I think its worth the time and effort to go backwards.
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