In every blog there are some items those are read more than others. These posts are usually popular ones that attract more comments, more visits, more references or more tweets.
Few days ago, I was searching for something in TheCustomizeWindows, I noticed one post got an astonishing amount of re-tweets. Astonishing, because it is not about making money, not about any trick; just a simple post on how you can start blogging.
So, one thing is that, you can not predict which post will be very popular and which will be a flop. It often happens to me, the posts which I gave maximal effort and expected it would be very popular, in practice that did not happened anyway.
There are many ways to highlight the popular posts, most often read post in your blogs. For WordPress there are numerous kind of plugins to do these automatically. But the basic reasons, why you will link your popular articles in different ways (like leaving link on the sidebar, end of the post, inside a post etc) are described below.
Making your visitors sticky
When new readers read your blog, there are quite likely to remain no more than a minute looking at the page where they have entered and then click the back button of your browser to return to the place from where they came or simply close the browser tab.
Provide readers with something else, that means to spend more time on your blog, discover their contents and decide to become loyal readers.
If you allow them to navigate more deeply through your blog, giving them the ability to find useful content, it is probably give you big return.
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If what you are writing is offering a guide or tutorial on your blog, you can have the probabillity to to make a regular stop on your blog.
Provide a way for the search engine spiders
A search engines like links that lead them deeper into the content of your blog and the benefits derived from it.
The articles are featured in some way are usually are the most visited blogs, Google usually better position, since the post are links to a Google votes for and, therefore, not only gives emphasis on external links, but also to internal links .
As before, you are offering to form a guide to your blog, showing the most popular posts for them to promote.
There are many WordPress plugins that allow you to highlight your most important posts, as I wrote at the begining; so it is a section to add to your blog that it would be good to consider. These might slow down your website a bit or add some errors to show up in W3C validation; but that is worty in the term of increased number of pageviews.
