I’m sure you have all seen the various sliding, scrolling, rotating, blinking or fading featured post concoctions floating around the Internet lately. While some people love them, some hate them and others could care less, there is one reason why every site should have them that should trump any reason you could have to not have one. Looking at the big players sites you will see that they all have them and whether they know it or not there is a very good reason why they are there.

As more and more sites pop up daily it’s getting  harder to make your site stand out, but I’m not talking about just making it stand out to your readers, we need to pay attention to the search engines as well. Raking high for your desired keywords is tough and will only get tougher as time goes on. Of course the best way to rank for your desired keywords is to have those keywords in the content on your pages as posts, keeping the proper keyword density is very important and there is one easy way to ensure this happens on your site, use a featured post scroller.

When the search engines come to your site, they look for content and guess what, just like your readers they start at the top and head towards the bottom, the content on the top of the page is more likely to be indexed. By using a featured posts area at the top of your site you can remain in total control of the keywords that are on your page by having articles or posts that are your best SEO’d articles that you have written for your site. As you make new posts your homepage content will change, having featured posts at the top will allow you to write what you want without having to be so concerned about the impact that “losing that great post to page 2” will have on your homepage rankings.

The way these featured post areas work can be seen if you view the source of your page, if you look closely you will see that each post you have featured is there all the time in the code, right at the top of the content area which is what the search bots see and why doing this is so important.

So, what are you waiting for, get a featured posts area and find 5 of your best, most keyword optimized articles and put them in there. You will be pleased with the results.