Pageviews and a low bounce rate is at the core of a successful (commercial) website. What these terms refer to is quite simple: the number of visitors to your blog on one hand and secondly, the time and number of pageviews you get on a website. All in all, without going into SEO “trickery” the page view count and the bounce rate can be increased and respectively decreased via simple blog management rules and optimizations, which is what we’re going to detail in this article.
Preliminaries:
Before you can track, or let alone make any improvements to your pageviews or bounce rate, you have to set up your site so you can track them. You do this via the Google Analytics for WordPress, which you need to download and install (it comes as a standard plugin).
Whether you are selling advertisements per page view or click, this is the way to keep a score on those numbers. Also, good content is essential to having any success, and no trickery can really change this in the long term.
Post interlinking
One way to get more views is to interlink – which is a method that is very simple to implement. You might get it done manually, scrolling down within your archives, but this can take a lot of time. Using http://www.mbpninjaaffiliate.com for instance, can do this automatically. Even if this is an affiliate link builder, it can work as an internal link generator too. There are other plugins that do this very same job, so pick one that you like.
Related posts
One way to keep a user from exiting your website is to show him/her more content that is related to the subject of the post he’s just clicked on. How do you do that? Simple, you show a related array of posts on the page (generally at the end of the page). The YARPP plugin helps you do this, automatically generating a list of posts at the end of a post that are similar in content. Or, you can manually pick related posts via tagging and category usage.
Excerpting older posts
Another way to decrease bounce rates is to have bits of older posts excerpted and ready to be clicked; this is great for a couple of reasons – it decreases load times for archived material and it allows a “second life” for older posts. Also, you should never show full posts on your front page in order to increase page
views. To help you do this use a good theme framework, such as Thesis, Genesis, or Headway, that have excerpting options built in.
Split posts
If you’ve worked on a long/large post that takes a lot of “space” you want to profit from it in full. The way to do it is to partition your content in splits. There is an art to it, as you don’t want your content “chopped” to the point where it is unusable, but you want it to generate enough clicks for you that the content and time spent to generate it is properly rewarded.
Interactive sidebar
Having an interactive sidebar that hosts popular posts, in whatever arrangement, by date or by some other framework will help users better navigate to a post and thus bring new users to older posts.
Create a feature that encourages browsing
You don’t always have to “play by the rules”! You can break forth the wall and directly engage your readership to see older material by either using a button to randomize a link to other content or by some other means. Sometimes just reminding your readership in a post to check out some older posts can be a way to encourage them, or simply by having regular posts that contain lists of your older posts can do the trick.