Mar 10
24
Forget Most Recent Posts – Popular Posts Are More Significant To Your Website Visitors
Most websites that I visit proudly show a selection of most recent posts. Although is there any point in this? Might it even be an unecessary disturbance that loses traffic for you? Lets look at it from the point of view of people and search engines.
Human traffic
To begin with, brand new visitors to your web site ought to be sold on your blog. Your most recent posts might be your best ever work, but more likely they are just average. In its place you want to alert them to your best writing, which is probably your most read writing. So a list of your most popular posts might just attract the attention of a few new readers and convince them to read on.
The problem is there is limited space on a screen and if you have a recent posts and a most popular posts set of links, you are providing your visitors a lot of information. You need to steer them towards those posts that attract attention and hope this will get them to subscribe to your writings.
But what concerning existing readers? These do need to be told of your latest posts. But these will maybe be following your RSS feeds or subscribing to your newsletter. Both of these will be alerting them to the new writings. Also, present readers coming directly to your web site are most likely to land on your homepage as compared with a post. If your homepage has the links to your most recent work, then that satisfies their needs.
So for human traffic, whether they are new to you and have arrived on a post or current readers arriving from your RSS read, then steering them to your most popular work is the greatest way of making certain more page views.
Search Engines
But surely for search engines it is far better to link to new posts from every page of your internet site? That way as soon as a search engine visits any page of your internet site then they are alerted to the existence of new posts? This makes sure rapid caching of the pages? Right?
Wrong!
For a start, if you are using any descent kind of blogging platform new posts will ping the search engines. This is where you tell the search engines that the new post exists. Secondly, there are far superior ways of doing this function without distracting from guiding your traffic around the site.
To make sure that search engines do pick up all new posts it is better to put in a sitemap plugin. These will notify search engines which pages are new and updated in the format that they prefer to work Silagra with. You can also use services such as Twitter to announce the arrival of new pages.
Also, by elliminating the list of new posts from every page, you are helping to channel the page rank about the blog. Rather then it always pointing for the interim to new posts you are pointing it to the most precious posts in your arsenal. This might just lift these posts a little higher in the search engines and boost your traffic even more.
So lose your most recent posts list and switch it with a most popular posts list.
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Written by Keith Lunt, experienced blogger.
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