Basic Lesson 7: Organizing Your Blog By Topic (Labels)

Most people find it easier to search a blog by topic. Fortunately, Blogger has included a feature called labels that make it easy to provide a list of postings by topic.

At the bottom of the post window is a section called "Labels for this post". In this box, you can enter any terms you think will help categorize your posts. Labels can contain more than one word. If you are using multiple labels for a posting, make sure to separate each label with a comma.



If you find it hard to remember the labels being used on your blog, just click on the show all link. This will display all the labels currently being used on the blog. Just click the "Hide all" link to hide the labels again.



Once you've assigned labels to all your posts, you need to display a clickable index of those labels on your blog so that readers can display all posts related to that particular topic. To add an index of your labels, you must insert a new page element on your blog layout.

In the blog editing mode, click on the Template tab. Then click on the Page Elements sub-tab. Click on the Add a Page Element link to display the list of possible page elements that can be added to your blog.



From the list of elements in the Choose a New Page Element dialog box, click Add to Blog under the element Labels.



The Configure Labels dialog box now appears. Change the title for the archive list to something obvious like Blog Topics. Chose to sort the topics alphabetically or by frequency (number of postings in that topic). Click the orange Save Changes button to add the topic archive to your blog.



When you click on View Blog, you will notice that the topic archive is now displayed on your blog. Every time you assign labels to a blog posting and publish the post, this list will be updated.