How to optimise popular posts

Pink Knit Cupcake Tea Cosy - Gezuntehmoid via Flickr

I just read a great tip from Darren Rowse, the blogfather over at pro-blogger - a great place to learn new blog tips - although there's so many it could take you months.  This one was so incredibly obvious and simple that I felt compelled to share it right away! Its time for a quick cuppa and a look at your blog stats!

Most blogs have a few hot posts in their archives, and they’re not always the ones you’d expect. These posts are real opportunities—there are people viewing them and chances are that once they do, they then disappear never to return. [...] Does your blog have hot posts? And have you optimized them?  Pro Blogger

Great advice don't you think? Rather than writing a new post today why not head over to your blogger stats page or better still to your google analytics account and find out which of your posts are doing particularly well for you.

Find out which posts are bringing in the most visitors for whatever keyword, from which ever referral site and then go and optimise them.

• Edit to include a link over to your newsletter sign up or your shop - or whatever you want to promote. Be subtle as you don't want your successful post to look like a spammy advertising post and put off visitors from staying and reading it.
  
• Edit to include links to your related blog posts that could benefit from the connection.   
• If the traffic is all coming from one referral, bear in mind the type of visitor and their interests - what could you tempt them with to stay a little longer?
  
• Scan through the text to see if there are opportunities for you to add hyper text links to your listings, blog posts or website pages.  Always link to specific urls and not home pages. Make sure the link is relevant to the text you have hyperlinked. Don't ever use 'click here'.
  
• Don't alter the body text too much (if the post is already doing really well in searches) other than to add in any keywords you think may help further improve its reach - you don't want to negatively affect your ''hot post''. The search bots will be back to index your page at some point - read this fascinating (well I think so!) description of how google's indexer works

 My Craft Fair Display Advice post is doing particularly well for me with lots of google searches and also referrals coming from the Crafts Forum where I posted a link for it a few weeks ago - I'm going to take a look at it and see if I can further optimise the post by adding a few extra keywords and links.

Happy Blogging

x Hilary :)

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