Most Popular Blog Posts: How to determine yours

In Part I I wrote about how it's important to highlight your most popular posts, your classic hits.

So how do you determine what's most popular?

A few things to look at:

• Number of comments
• Number of links and trackbacks
• Number of readers (via your Statistics package like StatCounter or Google Analytics)
• Posts that answer common questions, whether commonly asked online or offline

Now these don't always agree -- I've had low traffic posts with many comments and high traffic posts with zero comments, so it's not always cut and dried!

You'll want to exclude some posts, for example ones that:

• Are now out of date, for example posts on old breaking news
• Get primarily lots of untargeted search engine traffic (for example one post got lots of traffic from people searching on "dull person")
• You feel don't represent you well. Maybe they're off topic or who knows what.

What you personally like matters too!

Here's my most popular list (in no particular order) and some reasons WHY I included each one:

•Shopping carts for blogs: specific recommendations
Lots of search engine traffic and a very popular question people ask of me. Links, comments and trackbacks too
•Blogging's ROI
Lots of readers, a common question, and I just like this post too!
•Building Repeat Blog Visitors and Traffic
People seem to just love this one
•Local Blogging Specific Advice
Important topic - i.e. I like it, and so do most other people too
•Blog Names are Very Important!
•Post Title Importance
Both of the above are just super popular. Lots of readers from all over, including the search engines.

Comments

[andyp]

I'd also add that it is useful to look at the search terms that are causing people to come to your blog, and which posts they land on (you imply this in your first choice). These will tend to be more popular posts by hits. In my case, I wrote a short post on renewing my car tax about a year ago, and the number of hits I get from that is based on the searches people are doing. Translating that interest into comments (and, I assume, longer-term readership) is another matter.

[Ted Demopoulos, Blogging for Business]

Absolutely Andy. I've been the number one Google hit for "naked goats" and "dull person" and other miscellaneous strange terms that have made certain posts "look" very popular, when in reality my core readers didn't care AND most of the visitors from search engines didn't either!