Most sites that I visit proudly display a selection of most recent posts. But is there any point in this? Can 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 traffic
To begin with, brand new visitors to your web site need to be sold on your web site. Your most recent posts may be your best ever work, but more probable they are just regular. As a replacement for 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 persuade them to read on.
The dilemma is there is limited room 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 in the direction of those posts that attract attention and hope this will get them to subscribe to your writings.
But what with reference to present readers? These do need to be told of your latest posts. But these will perhaps 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 website 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 traffic, 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 greatest way of insuring 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 blog then they are alerted to the presence of new posts? This ensures rapid caching of the pages? Right?
Wrong!
For a start, if you are applying 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 work without distracting from guiding your visitors about the website.
To make positive that search engines do pick up 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. As an alternative to it always pointing temporarily to new posts you are pointing it to the most important posts in your arsenal. This might just lift these posts somewhat higher in the search engines and boost your visitors even more.
So lose your most recent posts list and change it with a most popular posts list.
Author Resource:-
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