How To Make Individual Post Pages Popular?
Why do you get traffic to your blog’s home page? Why do you get traffic to your category, archive, and tagged pages?
The reason is simple. Your home or start page, category, archive, and tagged pages are all main highways for distributing traffic throughout your site. Basically as new content is added, these main highway pages are constantly being updated.
Lets pretend that you have a blog site with four categories: life, religion, politics and technology. Lets also assume that you write 10 posts per day. Three posts are about life, two posts are about religion, and four posts are about politics, and one post is about technology.
Here is an example of the folder structure of a blog site:
Daily readers and search engines understand that your home page is a page that is updated 10 times every day! That is a lot of updates. Daily readers and search engines understand that your Life Category is updated three times per day! Again… that’s a lot of updates. Daily readers and search engines understand that your Politics category is your most popular category and is the most updated page in your entire site aside from the home page… that’s a pretty popular page! Daily readers and search engines understand that your Technology category page is updated once a day. If I don’t visit it every day, then I will miss something!
Here is the little trick. Now that you are bared through reading these first few paragraphs… lets look at the Individual Post pages closer… what are they?
An individual post page is a page that is typically announcing something. It is a blog post, an entry, etc… “Dear Diary, I did this and this today”. A post page is a blast page. It announces news, events, etc… People read is and move on. That is the reason why individual pages pages don’t get a lot of repeat visits. People read the content, and then it becomes old news.
Unless you….
Make your individual post pages popular by giving your readers and search engine bots a reason to come back and read the page again. Who said that you had to make a post page a page about old news? Who said that you can’t invite and encourage your readers to check the page often because you will be frequently updating the page?
Do you see what I am saying? If you constantly update your individual post pages by adding, updating and changing the content… you will give readers and (more so) the Googlebots a reason to visit frequently… That is the trick… were you expecting something different? Sorry to disappoint you… but this trick is simple.
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Date/Time: 2-6-2007 05:58:51 Comment #537
Makes sense. Though I’m not sure why I’d want to update posts I’ve already written unless I found errors.
Date/Time: 2-6-2007 09:53:59 Comment #538
You would want to update posts pages to encourage crawlers to visit it often and index the new content, pages, links on the page.
A quick and less personal way of doing this is adding the related posts mod for Wordpress. It is less powerful than going back to the page and adding new content yourself…
You don’t have to do this to every post you publish… just the ones you want more traffic to and more frequent crawler visits.
This Page will be completely different tomorrow. And with the properly controlling my links, this page will frequently be visited by crawlers who are in a hunt for updated content. If the content on this page rarely moved, moved slow, or never changed at all, there would be no reason to view it again. But it does change… and often. So this page in due time will have more power over an individual post page.
So again, if you want to create a reason to come back… give readers and robots a reason and update the content on individual post pages.
Create an individual post page links page, an individual post page FAQ page, etc…
Date/Time: 2-7-2007 12:21:29 Comment #539
Thanks for the clarity, Gary. I get what you’re saying now. One question, when you speak of a ‘post page’ are you talking about creating a ‘page’ in WordPress and then directing a single post to that ‘page.’ Then updating the post on that ‘page’ as you wish?
Or is it different?
Sorry to ask for more clarity. When we’re speaking of WP, the term ‘pages’ can get a little confusing.
Date/Time: 2-9-2007 00:59:04 Comment #540
Yes… pages, posts, and static pages in Wordpress are nuts… static pages are confusing because they truly are not static pages… in fact, as you probably already know… all the posts, pages, folders, and permalink structures in Wordpress are dynamic. Quite different than blogger.com (some people like it… I don’t) I am old school and enjoy true static html pages.
Anyway… to answer your question… it doesn’t really matter if you write up the content and publish as a “Page” or a “Post”. Either or works and there are no rules that apply.
Basically, in order words… if you want to increase search engine traffic to an individual page… update it often, change the links in it, and change the content… but make sure it stays relevant to what the page was originally about.
If you manually treat this page or post just like a Wordpress treats the yourname.com/blog/page-2/ or the yourname.com/category/world-war-i-i-/page-27/ or the yourname.com/tag/video-games/ you basically are showing Google and other search engines that this page is a source to a constant flow of new content.
This whole idea and concept is to help people who don’t want a few of their “really good posts” buried deep within their site.
When you reply to a post in a message board, what happens? The post gets “Bumped” to the top and re-receives top traffic and exposure. In blogging… you can write a top selling e-novel grade article, and people can comment on it daily… but it will never get bumped to back to the top of your site (that is unless you modify the date stamp… which that isn’t good either because you screw with the original permalink structure of the post… unless you have modified the permalink structure like I have done to my site… so in essence, and not trying to get off topics… but that is another way you can bump your posts… again, assuming that you have already modified your site’s permalink structure in a way which would allow you to change the timestamp on posts where as it wouldn’t screw up its own permalink structure and end up creating a bunch of 404 pages.) and the only two reasons why people are commenting on it in the first place is because A.)People are linking directly to it or have saved it to their favorites, or B.)Some how Google has found it and has ranked it pretty high and people are finding it there.
How did Google find the page? And why did Google give it such a high ranking?
Not sure… but I do know that if you treat an individual page or individual post like wordpress treats your category, archive, and tags pages… then Google will recognize this page as a source for new content and place more weight and consideration on it when being displayed in the SERPS.