Ok, lets not be afraid of the word’s stigma.  Blog posts needs to be jocks to play one of their main role well; provide organic traffic. Blog posts (aka jocks) need to be fresh, hot and popular.

Blog posts need to be jocks

Are your posts jocks? Do they meet the following criteria?

1- Freshness: fresh or not so fresh content.

2- Hot topic: hot or not topics.

3- Good old links: lots of links or just a few.

These are basically the criteria deciding your blog posts ranking on SERPs. Lets look at each of them a little bit more.

1-Freshness

Blog posts are indexed faster than traditional pages, that’s a given. The reason is they’re considered timely and fresh content. That’s Google’s QDF (Query Deserve Freshness) advantage.

Blog posts can accordingly benefit a small increase in position advantage in the SERP, in the short term if they also meet the 2 other criteria.

2- Hot topics

If a blog post is considered a hot topic by the search engines it will benefit from a better position in the SERP. If not, it will be considered not as hot and doesn’t get an advantage.

You may want to take advantage of this by focusing some of your posts around hot topics related to your industry, your site and your content.

The flip side; it’s very hard to get good SERP with your posts if they’re mundane topics: you may not want to use blog posts to issue plumbing advices in order to acquire traffic.

3-Good old links

If your blog posts gets lots of inbound links they’ll benefit from them by getting higher in the SERP. If they don’t get inbound links, there’s no advantage to posts.

Conclusion

If you use blog posts to get organic traffic you must meet these 3 criteria. If you’re missing 1 your blog posts will not rank well and if you’re missing 2 out of 3 you should maybe think to simply move them into traditional pages.