Findable Blogs — Search Engine Optimization for blogs

I got a great question over the weekend from Reonne of The Chocolate Fudge Cafe:

What’s the best way to make it so that my initial post, “Stir The Pot,” stays on the first page of my blog? How did you make it so that your findableblogs.com first page stays the same…like a website? I thought that posts automatically get archived as you continue to update and write new posts. I’d like what I said in the beginning to stay on there for at least awhile, but I want to add new material as well.

First, a confession: the only reason the front page of this blog hasn’t changed for a while (prior to this post and a change I’ll talk about in a moment) is that I haven’t written anything for a while! Between client work and an ebook I’m about to release, I’ve been a complete slacker where this blog is concerned.

If you’d rather not do the slacker thing (like Reonne, you have posts to write!), you have three options.

Use a Page as the home page

That probably sounds cryptic if you don’t understand the difference between Posts and Pages in WordPress, but a Page is designed to stick around without changing, while Posts tend to appear and disappear from the homepage, archives, and search results relative to how many other Posts you have.

You create a Page in the same way you do a Post, but instead of going to “Write” → “Post” (or just “Write”, since “Post” is the default sub-tab), you go to “Write” → “Page”. If you want the whole front page to stay essentially the same for a while, this is a good way to do it; just create the page here.

Once you’ve created your page, go to “Settings” → “Reading” (”Options” → “Reading” in pre-2.5 versions of WordPress) and switch the “Front page displays” setting to a “static page” of your choice. For instance, if I was going to change the front page of this blog to my “About” Page, I’d set it like so:

In fact, this is exactly what I’m going to do when I finish coding the new design for this site. In that case, I’ll create a special “Home” Page that will have the front page content, and that will be the first thing new visitors see.

The potential downside to this approach? Your front page is the Page you set up, not a list of entries. That might suit you just fine (like I said, that’s exactly what I’m planning on), but if you want your front page to automatically update with new posts, keep reading.

Use the WordPress time stamp magic

With WordPress, you can easily change the dates on your posts. The newest post shows up at the top of your front page (unless you’re using a very unusual theme), so all you have to do is make sure that the post you want at the top is always dated after the other posts.

This can be a bit of a pain, because you’ll need to change the date on the “top” post every time you create another post, or back-date your new posts to make them “older”, which is just confusing (if I was choosing between the two, I’d change the date on the “top” post each time).

Clearly, this isn’t as passive as the first method, but if you’re only talking about a few weeks or a few posts, it’s not that bad and accomplishes the goal nicely.

Use the sidebar

If the content you want to feature is really a kind of introduction, it might make sense to put it in the sidebar using a Widget. That way, it’s always readily available in a place where people look when they’re searching for context, but it’s not in the way of your content and doesn’t require any particular maintenance effort on your part.

All things being equal, this is probably the route I’d take in most cases, if it suits the content.

Advanced options

You can actually combine some of these ideas if you’re comfortable editing your theme. For instance, if you know your way around The Loop, you could show the content of a Page first thing, directly followed by the regular Posts. You could also just manually edit your theme’s home.php or index.php file to show a certain message before the regular content.

However, neither of these options are as easy or convenient as the previous three “out-of-the-box” options, so I tend to avoid them for short-term changes.

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