Optimize Your Blog With “Sticky Posts”
Web marketing consultant Stephan Spencer is a big believer in “sticky posts” as Blog Optimization tools.
First, a word about sticky posts. These are posts that regardless of the date or time you first upload them to your blog, they will appear at the top of your lists of posts. That way, when your readers come to your blog, they are much more likely to notice those posts first.
Some blog authoring tools, such as Google-owned Blogger allow sticky posts natively, while others require the use ofa plugin. An example is the Adhesive plugin for WordPress).
“Why would you ever want to make a post sticky? Because it’s an easy way to improve the keyword prominence on a category page or tag page,” Stephan writes. He then justifies this “prominence” on the basis of the fact that the closer to the beginning of the page your targeted keyword is, you will be ranked higher by blog search tools.
“So, having keyword-rich intro copy that consistently appears at the top of a category page or a tag page will give you good keyword prominence and help you maintain a stable keyword theme for the page even when old posts fall off the page and new posts appear,” he adds.
In terms of the wording within your sticky post, Stephan suggests writing copy that is keyword rich. Then, after you compose the post, your next task will be to ensure that you categorize and tag it so that it becomes a Sticky. Along with this strategy, Stephan suggests you back-date the post so it doesn’t appear on the top of your home page, just on the appropriate tag or category or page.
Here’s where the Adhesive plugin adds some important functionality.
As Stephan explains, Adhesive offers a “Show Sticky Posts Only on Category Pages” option in the configuration settings. You should select that option. Doing so will safeguard Sticky posts never appearing on your home page.
For advanced users, (i.e., blog-writing code jocks), Stephan points to the UltimateTagWarrior tool that can create tag pages. To enable this, Stephan suggests edit the following line (which appears twice) in the Adhesive plugin from:
if(!adhesive_get_options('category_only') || is_category())
to:
if(!adhesive_get_options('category_only') || is_category() || is_tag())
Of course it is possible you don’t use WordPress, and are thus unable to use Adhesive. Or maybe you don’t want to deal with code.
There is an alternative. Not an easy alternative, but a workable one nonetheless.
Stephan suggests putting your intro copy directly into your template/theme and use a series of if/then statements to determine which copy to display based on which category/tag is active.
Tags: blog, Blog Optimization, blogger, consistent, deal, Google, GOP, hr, im, IT, keyword-rich, marketing, optimization, optimize, options, PR, prominence, rank, reader, readers, RSS, search, target, wiki, wordpress, XP