Word Press Plugins

http://www.philhill.net/category/marketing/

How to add curated content to your blog without cluttering your home page

March 30, 2012 in Curation, Marketing, My Blog with 1 Comment

Content curation is a sure fire way to add compelling stories to your blog. One problem that can arise though, is how do you avoid cluttering your home page with lots of articles you want on your blog site but not necessarily at front stage. For example, you may not want a curated story competing with the blog posts you write yourself.

What i tend to do is send most of my curated articles to the background using a wordpress plug-in WP Hide Post.

Here’s an example of how i put together a series of curated articles on guerrilla marketing. Only one of the posts actually appears on my home page; I tagged the others with a common tag (How-To-Market-Like-A-Guerilla) and then point people to the tag summary page so they can view all of the articles as a list  - http://philhill.net/tag/How-To-Market-Like-A-Guerilla.

Here’s how the plug-in works – I grabbed this from the wordpress website:

This plugin excels in giving you full control over the visibility of your a post. By default, any post you add to your WordPress blog will become the topmost post, and will show up immediately on the front page in the first position, and similarly in category/tag/archive pages. Sometimes, you want to create a “low-profile” addition to your blog that doesn’t belong on the front page, or maybe you don’t want it to show up anywhere else in your blog except when you explicitly link to it. This plugin allows you to create such “hidden gems”.

In particular, this plugin allows you to control the visibility of a post in various different views:

• The Front Page (Homepage, depending on your theme, this may not be relevant)
• The Category Page (listing the posts belonging to a category)
• The Tag Page (listing the posts tagged with a given tag)
• The Authors Page (listing the posts belonging to an author)
• The Archive Pages (listing the posts belonging to time period: month, week, day, etc..)
• The Search Results
• Feeds

Here’s what it looks like when you edit a post. See the top box in the right hand corner called “Post Visibility”:

The posts will disappear from the places you choose them to disappear. Everywhere else they will show up as regular posts. In particular, permalinks of the posts still work, and if you generate a sitemap, with something like the Google XML Sitemaps the post will be there as well. This means that the content of your post will be indexed and searchable by search engines.

For a WordPress page, this plugin also allows you to control the visibility with two options:

• Hide a page on the front page (homepage) only.
• Hide a page everywhere in the blog (hiding the page in the search results is optional).

This means, technically, whenever pages are listed somewhere using the get_pages filter, this plugin will kick in and either filter it out or not according to the options you choose. The same rules apply regarding permalinks and sitemaps as they do for regular posts.

“WP Hide Post” plugin is a great tool in your arsenal for SEO optimization. It allows you to add plenty of content to your blog, without forcing you to change the nature and presentation of your front page, for example. You can now create content that you otherwise would be reluctant to add to your blog because it would show immediately on the front page, or somewhere else where it would not belong. It’s a must-have feature of WordPress.

Please enjoy this plugin freely, comment and rate it profusely, and send me feedback and any ideas for new features.

Download the free plugin from here.