As you know blogs are well known for publication of quality content on regular basis. And all of posts that we publish to our blog are shown in the reverse-chronological order. So all of your quality posts will get away from home page after few weeks or even few days as new posts arrives. So how you will promote or show off your all time quality posts on your blog so that new visitors also have easy access to some of your quality old posts. This post will deal with showing off your old posts on your blog more prominently.
Tips that I will be mentioning here will apply to most of blogging platforms, but have created this explicitly for WordPress blogs:
Show related posts
First thing you can do is start showing some of your related posts towards the end of a current blog posts. And there is a related post plugin available if you are running a WordPress blog.
Create links to old posts
Why not link to your old posts in your future posts where ever they look natural. And most importantly search engines love linking of your old posts in this fashion and will help better search engine rankings and page rank for posts that got linked this way.
Showing random posts
You can think of showing some random post from your blog achieves. There is a random post plugin available if you are running a WordPress based blog. This plugin will allows you to display a random post from a designated category.
Republish your old posts
There may be promotional, product based or your favorite posts, you want to show on your blog home page now and then. And to achieve this, you should seriously think about republishing your old posts. If you are ruining a WordPress blog and your Permalinks structure is of /%post% format, go to any of your old post, simply change the publication date, and that post will start showing your blog home page. There will be some issues if your Permalinks structure is of format /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/. Because, it this case, you will have new URL every time you republish your old blog posts. So all of your efforts, you will put in for old posts will be gone. All bookmarks, links that you gathered for that post will not work any way. So what is the solution to this problem?
There is a Permalinks Migration Plugin for wordpress from Dean Lee website. You can switch to more SEO friendly Permalinks structure /%post% with this plugin quite easily and most importantly, this plugin will create a 301 redirect from your old URL’s. Click here to know more about migrating your permalinks to SEO friendly URL for WordPress blogs.
Create themed posts
Creating themed posts will also help you show of your targeted posts back on home page. I himself used to create themed posts here on my blog. Some of themed posts that I created in past were:
Paid blogging options for making money online
List of making money online websites
How I make money online doing blogging
How to make money selling text links on your website
Top 5 ways to make money from your blog
Search Bar Option
I have doubts, how many of our blog readers actually use search box to find a topic of their interest. But if you want, you can test by showing a search box in your blog header or sidebar and see how it goes. This way also, you can showcase your old posts to your targeted visitors.
What you do to highlight your old posts to the world, please share in the comments section below.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Anil,
Great post. I doubt that people/readers actually use the search option in a blog.
I believe the best option is to have a sidebar which has 2 columns:
Popular Posts (according to comments)
and
Recent Posts
Besides that, related posts at the end of the current post are also a good idea.
-Nabeel
I’m extremely fond of linking to old posts. Something I have been a little lax about since I migrated to WordPress. But I going to do better, promise!
I use the Link Within plugin to show related posts at the end of each article. It works quite well.
I’m also going to try the migration plugin to change my url structure so I can republish some my old posts. They are old, but still full of timely advice and information.
One of main reason for me to switch to this URL format was the ability to republish some of my favorite stuff which get lost in archives
That’s pretty useful post.Often old posts without much search engine ranking left with oblivion.’ve to think about it.
Old Posts are very important and the navigation of a Blog should be user friendly so that old blog posts could easily be identified