Wouldn’t it make sense to take your very best posts, regardless of posting date, and endow them with a maximum amount of link gain so they have the most opportunity to rank well in the search engines? 

Putting together a Top 10 Posts list for your home page will do exactly that, by strategically passing link gain from your blog’s home page directly to these posts. 

The great thing about a Top 10 list is that you can be as arbitrary as you want in determining which posts get onto this list. It could be the ones that lead with your most important keywords. Or the ones that most effectively soft sell your products or services. Or simply the posts you personally like the most. Just be careful to choose “evergreen” posts that won’t lose their appeal or value after a few days or weeks. 

I really like the way Darren Rowse has done his featured posts list on ProBlogger, where he’s listed them in a box labeled “introduction: key articles”. He’s also sprinkled a couple more into his “tips and hints: toolbox” and “problogger news” boxes, along with links to category pages. The links are very enticing to users, and of course they are text links with great anchor text in them, so they are appealing to search engines too. Nice job, Darren!

If you’re happy to leave it up to your readers to decide, then simply install a ‘most popular posts’ plugin such as the Popularity Contest plugin for WordPress. The plugin automatically compiles the list based on which posts get viewed the most. You can publish the list on the home page and whereever else you see fit.