(NOTE: this is part of the “Blogging tips” series)
After you have been blogging for a while, you may begin to notice this problem for yourself: some of your best posts are “buried” deep in your blog. Unless people arrive there from search engines or external (or internal) links to them, they’ll never be seen again.
Also, think about someone who’s just arrived at your blog for the first time. They may find your blog’s subject interesting (or, even, what they’ve been looking for). However, where to start? It may well be that your recent posts, naturally, don’t “reinvent the wheel” - don’t introduce what your blog is about, as if that was the first thing a reader saw (the waste of space would be scary…) On the other hand, what will the visitor do? Use the archives to read your first post, and read on from there? It’s really doubtful that anyone will read hundreds or thousands of posts in chronological order - how long would that take? Days?
The solution, then, is a “Top Posts” page (it may be called something different, such as “best posts” or “most popular articles”.)
That works mostly as a static page (in a way, much like the index for this series), where you list your top posts, with short (1-2 lines, not longer) descriptions of what they’re about. I said mostly static because, of course, you will be adding to it from time to time.
Which articles to include in it? There’s no “hard” criteria, but I suggest the following guidelines:
- Try to keep the number of posts at about 20. If there are about 100 “top posts”, that’s almost an entire, smaller blog, and almost nobody reads that much in a sitting.
- Take your time - add an article there only after it’s been away from the front page for a while. It should have been an article that has “stood the test of time”, so to speak.
- If possible, choose an article that has some user comments.
- If possible, too, choose a post that other blogs/sites have linked to.
- Choose “timeless” articles - guides, hints and tips, original content, etc.. Conversely, avoid posts that only make sense at that time, such as news or commentary about some event that has just happened.
- Try to pick “independent” articles, instead of posts that are continuations of others - or continued in others.
By the way, here are this blog’s top posts. 
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After your blog is established and you have enough content, it’s also useful to have a complete list of your postings available somewhere, for two reasons: First, it helps you find your own material more quickly when making comments in other blogs. Second, it helps the search engines find your content. Just make sure the archive contains permalinks and you should be fine. It helps if you can organize the list somewhat, too, such as sorting them by date and so on.
Thanks for the suggestion. Hmm, maybe there’s a WordPress plugin to do that automatically…
Can’t help you there, as I use blojsom, but you can see an example of an archive page here on my site. I’m not done yet, I’m putting together different lists sorted differently. Don’t forget to reference the archive(s) from your sitemap, if you have one, and from the main page of your blog….
I was thinking of taking up this suggestion around when I get past the 300 post mark but instead of me coming up with the list, I was thinking of having readers come up with lists and formulating the common “top posts” from there. It certainly saves me a lot of rereading!
Thanks for the ideas. I have blogmarked you.
This sounds like a great idea! We host our own blogs as part of our larger business sites, so this would be very easy to do, and should help with SEO. Our blogs are too new to implement it now, so I hope I don’t forget about doing this in the future. Thanks for the tips.