However, I’m still keeping my CommentLuv, though I haven’t fully decided on the top commenter plugin just yet. I mean, our friend Sire is way ahead of everyone else, and the other four people in the list haven’t visited or written anything in, well, months.

Having recent posts is important. The visitor wont be in home page. he may hit your site from SE and then Recent posts will give them a other posts to look for.

@Sita, You are welcome. I hope the points work out well for me as you are experiencing it yourself

@Donace, thanks a lot for your detailed view on this topic. I should try out the SEO smart links but I wouldn’t want to separate comments to a new page. This may increase one page hits (but also need to be rewarded accordingly for the pain). I expect the # of comments go down drastically as well when this approach is taken. I already lost some commenters who were targetting top commenter slot .

Btw, the idea behind increased number of posts on homepage was to optimize the content relevancy with respect to the header title and description. Also, the beginning of each post has some SEO done at times and they will hopefully contribute to some home hits.

@Raju, I know…recent posts are always useful but when I show 7 posts on the homepage already, I was wondering whether I need recents posts. But you are right, it has to be concise and visible somewhere above the folder. I should work towards finding the best real estate area for the same.

Hompe page PR may be diluted but spread internally. Since inner pages in turn contribute to the homepage PR as well, I don’t think it will be a huge dilution. After all, we need more post hits than home hits right?

Thank you all for your detailed comments and the value addition to the discussion thread!

Linking to more posts from your hompeage yes that will help boost rankings; the main reason being these posts are then linked internally from each post/page etc and therefore the number of increased (internal) links to that page allows it to be crawled more regularly and more emphasis is added to its value.

So yes it will work and does work well though have to also consider dilution of link value as the number increases.

In regards to increased post count on the homepage in regards to keyword density etc is it arguable by adding more posts to your front page you will have more of those keywords and therefore rank better. Though I myself am of the opinion that one post pages work better as they are better ‘targeted’ (useful for adsense and preventing keyword dilution if your post topic varies like mine does).

Will be interesting to see the out come of this experiment.

In regards to internal linking I use ‘seo smart links’ what this essentially does is allows you to link to the post automatically if a keyword or the post title is mentioned….saves me having to look up permalinks a lot :p

In regards to keywords in the meta it may help I haven’t been able to quantify any change when I did it due to other growth strategies at the time, again the outcome would be interesting to see.

Lastly about TC/Cl I have actually restricted TC to my front page only as it works better in my opinion; they get a nice PR5 back and I dont lose any valuable ‘focus’ from internal pages and posts.

I have also recently implemented ‘seo smart comments’ this creates a separate page for each comments providing the commenter with a do-follow link while minimising dilution and increasing unique content as some times comments rank for keywords the post doesnt :p

Though will keep an eye on your seo efforts

Thanks for the timely and useful posts