Use Landing Pages to Highlight Your Best Posts

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Are your best posts collecting cobwebs?

There's one big problem with blogs, and it's the same thing that makes them great. I'm talking about their sequential nature, the way the freshest content is right there on the front page. So, perhaps, is the past week's worth of new material.

For everything else, it's out of sight, out of mind.

A'Best-of' page isn't enough

Alison wrote a post a while back about creating a Best-of page to showcase what you consider to be your most informative, most inspiring, or most entertaining posts.

And this is good advice.  You should have a Best-of page, or at least a popular posts widget or some other way for new readers to immediately find your best content that might otherwise be buried in your blog's archives.

But a Best-of page isn't enough.

Just like posts, pages should be shareable

The trouble with a comprehensive Best-of page is that it's—well, comprehensive.  And comprehensive is bad, when it comes to getting people to share your content.

Your posts should generally be about one topic and one topic only: Nobody wants to share your awesome yoga how-to list if it's preceded by the strange-looking oatmeal you had for breakfast and followed by what your cat did today.

Bite size, on-topic posts are far more shareable, tweetable, and Stumble-able, and it's through this sharing that you grow your readership.

Why landing pages are better

And it's the same with your pages.  For many months, I had a Best-of page on No Meat Athlete that didn't get looked at too often.  It was separated into sections: running, food for training, Boston Marathon qualifying, etc.

Then one day it hit me, thanks in no small part to reading Authority Rules and following the links to further posts about landing pages and cornerstone content.  Make separate pages for each section!

I've found that first-time readers are FAR more likely to click on a Natural Running Fuel page or a Qualifying for Boston page than a run-of-the-mill, catch-all Best-of page.  And even more importantly, they're more likely to share it or bookmark it.

What's more, these pages become the search-engine epicenter for all your best posts on the topic.  The landing pages are loaded with keywords already.  Give them strong titles and the basic search-engine optimization treatment, then link back to them end of each post that's listed.

You can do all this in half an hour tops.  Do it and fail to see a traffic boost, and I'll buy you a veggie burger.  You can get started with just the tips I've listed here.  If you want more, Copyblogger has a good series on landing pages, organized in (what else?) a landing page.

We're talking about your blog's cornerstone content here, the stuff you most want your readers to see.  Doesn't it deserve its own page?

Don't forget!

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