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08.13.09 Optimizing Individual Blog Posts For Higher Ranking  By
Thomas McMahon
As blogs grow, and new content gets created, old blog posts can quickly get lost in the archives. As much as bloggers try to keep everything organized, it's hard to ensure that all posts get the exposure they deserve. However, there are ways to help ensure that older posts get additional exposure. 1. Related Posts On individual post pages, add links to other related posts. This shows visitors that there is more content on your blog that might be of interest to the reader. I'd suggest showing 5 posts as it gives a little variety without giving to many options. Tip: Try out the Yet Another Related Posts Plug-in to integrate related posts into a WordPress blog. 2. Top or Popular Posts In the sidebar, create a section for the blogs most popular posts. Again, pulling in 5 posts from the entire history of the blog and showcase what users feel are the best posts on your blog. Tip: Read How To Find Your Most Popular Posts for plug-ins and ideas for obtaining posts. 3. Recent Comments Having a list of the 5 most recent comments, with links back to those posts, can highlight which posts are getting the most chatter. These may be newer posts, or they may be older ones, either way, we are drawing more attention to additional posts and possibly gain more comments. Tip: Use the built in WordPress widget or get a recent comments plug-in to enable this functionality. 4. Random Post You can add a random link to the blog navigation that when it's clicked on, WordPress will choose a post at random to show. This works great for blogs with a lot of good information that doesn't necessarily get outdated over time. Then again, sometimes it's just fun to go back in time and see how things have evolved. Tip: The Random Redirect plug-in will help in creating a random link on your blog.
5. Social Icons Having social icons on each blog post helps encourage readers to promote those posts for you. As an example, if someone comes to your site from a search engine, lands on a post from 5 months ago, and likes it, we want to encourage them to Tweet it, bookmark it, or use one of the many social networks to drive more traffic to the post. Tip: Sociable is a nice plug-in for creating a list of social bookmarking icon links at the end of each post. The Social Bookmark Generator works well for creating a list of links or a drop down menu. 6. Internal Linking Internal linking is an easy way for a blog owner to control which older posts get additional exposure. When writing a post, cite what has been said in the past with links in the content. Readers may find that the supporting posts are evidence that you're an authority figure on the topic too. Tip: No plug-in required, just link to other posts in the content. Most blogs can benefit from using one, or more, of the items above to help showcase posts that may have fallen into the abyss of the archives. Bloggers write a lot of good content and anything that we can do to promote additional posts will benefit not only the blog, but the readers as well. What other ideas do you have to promote older posts? Share them in the comments below. Comments About the Author: Thomas McMahon is a SEO Designer for TopRank Online Marketing in Minneapolis, MN. His specialities inlude technical optimization of existing web sites, creating search engine friendly web designs, and blog optimization. He has also created a number of blog marketing tools, WordPress plug-ins and FireFox add-ons. Blog: http://bloggerdesign.com |
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