Create Optimized Blog FAQs On The Fly

I love read­ers’ ques­tions. And some­times, the same ques­tions keep com­ing up that I decide on post­ing a blan­ket answer on this blog to cover them.

I do this as a way to cre­ate con­tent for this blog, help my read­ers find the answers they’re look­ing for, and save me time from not hav­ing to answer the same ques­tions over and over again.

Prob­lem is, many peo­ple never find the blog post that answers their ques­tion, par­tic­u­larly if it’s old and sit­ting deep in the archives. And many peo­ple don’t take the time to search for it, because it’s work and it’s sim­ply eas­ier to con­tact my staff for the answer.

I thought about cre­at­ing a fre­quently asked ques­tions (FAQ) page. But I wanted a brain-​​dead easy solu­tion to be able to do this in a snap (much like post­ing to this blog), and offer more to my readers.

But also, I wanted one that would opti­mize my page for the search engines (where spe­cific key­words are included in the titles and ques­tions), and be easy enough for me to sim­ply answer ques­tions as I go along.

Finally, I found one…

Knowl­edge Con­structs has just released a Word­Press plu­gin called FAQ-​​Tastic. This plu­gin allows you to eas­ily insert a tag in your post or page, and cre­ate FAQs in a snap from within the admin panel.

But it offers a lot more.

You can group ques­tions together (much like blog cat­e­gories), and you can even choose between sin­gle– or paged-​​question formats.

The dif­fer­ence is, the single-​​question for­mat will list all your ques­tions and answers on a sin­gle page. The paged for­mat allows you to link to answers cov­ered in their own indi­vid­ual posts or pages.

The lat­ter is an effec­tive solu­tion if your answers are often found in older posts.

You can eas­ily answer ques­tions by link­ing to pre­vi­ous blog posts, which also increases traf­fic to these pages and encour­ages deeper, inter­nal linking.

Or you can cre­ate a blog post to specif­i­cally answer a fre­quently asked question.

(You can even cre­ate a blog tem­plate page to fit a spe­cific style you want your FAQs to have, if dif­fer­ent from the rest of the blog.)

No need to search end­lessly for an answer. No need to peer through a ton of links in the archives. And no need to email the author for the answer to a com­mon question.

But that’s not all. FAQ-​​Tastic also offers two other fea­tures I really like.

First, each answer is accom­pa­nied by an anony­mous rat­ing sys­tem. The beauty of this fea­ture is that it allows you to see if your read­ers find your answers help­ful — and the feed­back can help you improve your answers.

And the sec­ond fea­ture is a form you can add at the bot­tom where peo­ple can ask you their ques­tions if they’re not found in the FAQ. They can also leave their email address to be instantly noti­fied when the answer is posted.

The single-​​page for­mat is the one I’ve cho­sen for this blog. Essen­tially, all ques­tions are found at the top, in a sum­mary. And each one is linked to the answer fur­ther down the page. Click on the ques­tion to jump to the answer.

I’m going to use this for a while to see how it goes. Let me know if you like this sys­tem by com­ment­ing to this post here, or even take some time to ask a ques­tion, if you can’t find it on this blog.

About the Author

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