Most sites that I visit proudly display a selection of most recent posts. However is there any point in this? Could it even be an unecessary diversion that loses traffic for you? Lets look at it from the point of view of people and search engines.
Human visitors
To start with, brand new visitors to your website should to be sold on your site. Your most recent posts might be your best ever work, but more likely they are just run of the mill. Instead you want to alert them to your best writing, which is perhaps your most read writing. So a list of your most popular posts could just attract the notice of a few new readers and persuade them to read on.
The difficulty 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 giving your visitors too much information. You need to steer them in the direction of those posts that attract attention and hope this will get them to subscribe to your writings.
But what regarding current readers? These do want to be told of your latest posts. But these will almost certainly be following your RSS feeds or subscribing to your newsletter. Both of these will be alerting them to the new writings. Also, existing readers coming directly to your web site are most likely to land on your homepage as opposed to a post. If your homepage has the links to your most recent work, then that satisfies their needs.
So for human visitors, whether they are new to you and have arrived on a post or existing readers arriving from your RSS read, then steering them to your most popular work is the best way of being sure more page views.
Search Engines
But surely for search engines it is far healthier to link to new posts from every page of your site? That way as soon as a search engine visits any page of your blog then they are alerted to the presence of new posts? This makes sure rapid caching of the pages? Right?
Wrong!
For a start, if you are applying any descent type 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 better ways of doing this function without distracting from guiding your visitors 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 tell search engines which pages are new and updated in the format that they prefer to work with. You can also use products such as Twitter to announce the arrival of new pages.
Also, by taking away the list of new posts from every page, you are helping to channel the page rank around the site. Rather than it always pointing in the interim to new posts you are pointing it to the most beneficial posts in your arsenal. This might just lift these posts somewhat higher in the search engines and boost your traffic even more.
So do away with your most recent posts list and switch it with a most popular posts list.
Author Resource:
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