Forget Most Recent Posts - Popular Posts Are More Vital To Your Site Traffic

Most sites that I visit proudly exhibit a selection of most recent posts. Although is there any point in this? Can it even be an unecessary distraction that loses visitors for you? Lets look at it from the point of view of humans and search engines.

Human visitors

To start with, brand new traffic to your blog must to be sold on your site. Your most recent posts might be your best ever work, but more likely they are just regular. Instead you want to alert them to your best writing, which is almost certainly your most read writing. So a list of your most popular posts could just attract the interest of a few new readers and persuade 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 giving your visitors a lot of 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 concerning present 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 straight to your website are most likely to land on your homepage besides a post. If your homepage has the links to your newest work, then that satisfies their needs.

So for human visitors, whether they are new to you and have arrived on a post or present readers arriving from your RSS read, then steering them to your most popular work is the finest 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 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 beneifiting from 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 blog.

To make positive that search engines do get all new posts it is better to put in a sitemap plugin. These will inform search engines which pages are new and updated in the format that they prefer to work with. You can also use offerings 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 around the blog. Instead of it always pointing momentarily to new posts you are pointing it to the most important posts in your arsenal. This may just lift these posts a little higher in the search engines and boost your visitors even more.

So get rid of your most recent posts list and change it with a most popular posts list.

Article Source: http://gamblingarticlessite.com

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