A good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) technique for ANY website is for a site to be easily “navigable” by the Search Engine’s bots. This means having a lot of links to the pages in your site. Not only is this a good thing for Search Engines, but it’s also a VERY good thing for your HUMAN readers too.
One thing that I have noticed is missing from a lot of free WordPress templates is a “Recent Posts” list. I think having this is EXTREMELY important. Here’s why:
1 – It gives a list of links to other pages in your blog. Remember, search engines like links.
2 – It gives readers a nice list of other posts that they might find interesting.
For example, if a reader lands on a page on your site via a Search Engine, let’s say Google, and they read what they came for, how would they know that there might be other info that they MIGHT like to read? Other than your absolute skill in writing in the current post. ๐ But, if there’s a readily available list of other topics you’ve discussed on your website, it will make life a lot easier (and possibly even enjoyable) for your readers.
So, if you have a WordPress Template that doesn’t have this “Recent Posts” list, here is the code that will give it to you:
<ul>
<?php get_archives(‘postbypost’,’9′,’html’,’» ’,”); ?>
</ul>
As you can see, we have the “command” get_archives() with 5 parameters. Here is what they do:
- ‘postbypost’ – This tells WordPress to give you a list of Posts, as opposed to Archives (for example, January, February).
- ‘9’ – This can be any number, and signifies how many posts to return
- ‘html’ – This tells WordPress to return the list in <li></li> list tags. As you can see, I’ve placed these between <ul></ul> tags to generate an Unordered List
- ‘» ’ – This parameter can be any text that you want to appear before your link. It can even include HTML tags, like <br /> for example. I like to use the ‘รยป’ character. (Here I am using the HTML code for this character with a space).
- ” – As with parameter 4, this is any text that you want to appear AFTER your post link. You can leave this paramter out if you don’t need it. (Leave it blank or just not put it in at all).