The Benefits of Popular Posts Widget for Blogs

[A Guest post by Bishal Adhikari from Tech Tips and Tricks]

If you run a blog, you must have used analytics to track your visitors. While using analytics, you may have noticed that some of the posts on your blog are popular than the others. So, many of you must have inserted a popular posts widget in your blog, showing the ones that get a good amount of traffic.

For WordPress blogs, these posts can displayed via the Popular Posts plugin. For Blogger blogs, you need to manually customize your template to insert some codes which in turn will show up the popular posts.

Showing popular posts on your blog has many advantages.

1. As popular posts widget includes the posts that the users prefer to read, you'll gain more traffic for them and new visitors will tend to spend more time on such posts.
2. If you have social bookmarking link embedded to each of your posts, such as the "digg it" button, it will be more fruitful. Your visitors who are into social bookmarking will possibly bookmark these posts. As a result, a lot of traffic will pour down from the social bookmarking sites.
3. You can add a "link to this page" item for each of your posts to generate its permalink dynamically. Popular posts are the ones that are generally liked by people. This will help increase your PageRank too to some extent.
4. Popular posts widget can be inserted via JavaScript. So, the links generated from JavaScript won't bleed out your page rank much.
5. Popular posts widget inserted through JavaScript can be customized to stand out, so that more people will tend to click on them.

The popular posts plugin for WordPress blogs ranks the posts based on the comments that they have accrued, i.e. the more comments a post gets, the higher it ranks in the widget. But, you can also add a popular posts widget for your blog based on your Google Analytics data, showing the posts that attract the highest number of traffic. You'll need to use Yahoo Pipes for aggregating the traffic data and also need to use a bit of JavaScript for inserting the widget into your blog.

All in all popular posts widget is a must have for any blog to get more traffic and attention.

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