Number of Blog Post Displayed

IMO, it really depends on the quality and length of your articles. For example, if you can pack a lot of quality content into 10 lines of text and call it one article, and only want 5 articles per page, go for it! But if 5 articles on a page means that the content on that page is going to be weaker than it would with 10 articles, I personally would put more articles per page. I'm in the beginning stages of my first blog right now, so I don't have a great deal of experience with SEO for blogs, but my plan is to pack in as much high-quality content as I can.

A quick, and heavy hitting, tip.

Use the "optional excerpt" feature built into wordpress and instead of running full articles on your index page, run just excerpts (use images in them too!).

The end result is some nice, uniform images with descriptive text and a link to the article on your home page and since the optional excerpt shows up only on the index and category pages, you won't have any duplicate issues.

Yahoo! and Google news have been doing this forever now.

I should have also added, if using the optional excerpt feature isn't your thing, that from an SEO standpoint having more than one article on your home page doesn't provide much added benefit.

Some downsides to be aware of with large numbers of articles on your homepage - The titles of all your home page articles are wrapped in H-tags by default. Your articles won't rank well on their own until they are off the homepage since they are essentially duplicate to the homepage, loads of redundant "comment here" links...

Strongly consider optional excerpts and style them to look any way you want them to. They don't have to be the normal, bland, "blah-blah-blah-read-more..." variety.

ambellina & JS_Harris,

Thank you both for the feedback.

Haven't seriously considered the 'optional excerpt' before, but will now.