Skate-Parts.Com has been maintaining a blog for some time now. While this is a powerful tool in its own right, the latest posts were not being displayed on the front page. Placing the latest blog posts, either just the titles or the summaries, on the home page and if possible on other pages such as in the sidebar or footer can make a big difference to your search engine optimisation and to your traffic conversion.
I find that using summaries is one of the most effective ways as it gives readers a hook to pull them into the articles with besides the title. It also allows you to use images if suitable.
In addition to hooking your readers in more effectively, it also ensures that your homepage is changing regularly. The more regularly your homepage changes, the more frequently Google crawls it, and the quicker your changes will show up in search results. While this might already be true for your blog page, it means that any changes to other parts of your website will start to get picked up faster too.
These blog post summaries also give your home page more keywords to rank for, and given that your home page usually has the highest page rank of all your pages, it makes it more influential for these keywords, potentially ranking your blog posts higher than they might have been if they were only on the blog page.
Give it a try and be sure to check your traffic statistics and search rankings before and after you do it. I am sure you will be pleasantly surprised.
