Forget Most Recent Posts – Popular Posts Are More Vital To Your Website Traffic

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

Human traffic

To start with, brand new visitors to your site must to be sold on your website. Your most recent posts may be your best ever work, but more probable they are just normal. As an alternative 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 might just attract the interest of a few new readers and persuade them to read on.

The trouble 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 traffic excessive information. You need to steer them towards those posts that draw 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 doubtless 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 internet site are most likely to land on your homepage as opposed to a post. If your homepage has the links to your newest 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 ensuring more page views.

Search Engines

But surely for search engines it is far superior to link to new posts from every page of your website? That way as soon as a search engine visits any page of your web site 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 sort 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 work without distracting from guiding your traffic round the website.

To make sure that search engines do pick up all new posts it is better to set up 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 blog. Instead of it always pointing in the interim to new posts you are pointing it to the most useful posts in your arsenal. This might just lift these posts a little higher in the search engines and increase your traffic even more.

So eradicate your most recent posts list and replace it with a most popular posts list.

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Written by Keith Lunt, experienced blogger.

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