Most blogs that I visit proudly display a list of most recent posts. However is there any point in this? Might it even be an unecessary distraction that loses traffic for you? Lets look at it from the point of view of humans and search engines. Human visitors To begin with, brand new visitors to your website need to be sold on your web site. Your most recent posts might be your finest ever work, but more likely they are just ordinary. Instead you want to alert them to your best writing, which is most likely your most read writing. So a list of your most popular posts could just attract the awareness of a few new readers and convince them to read on. The quandary 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 towards those posts that attract attention and hope this will get them to subscribe to your writings. But what with reference to existing readers? These do need to be told of your latest posts. But these will most likely 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 besides a post. If your homepage has the links to your latest 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 best 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 web 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 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 improved ways of doing this function without distracting from guiding your traffic around the blog. To make certain that search engines do get all new posts it is better to install 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 elliminating the list of new posts from every page, you are helping to channel the page rank about the site. Instead of it always pointing for the interim to new posts you are pointing it to the most beneficial posts in your arsenal. This may just lift these posts a little higher in the search engines and increase your traffic even more. So eliminate your most recent posts list and exchange it with a most popular posts list.
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Most recent posts links are in almost every site theme, but they are not the most capable way of channeling visitors and page rank round the site. Read why I think you ought to replace it with different page navigation.
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