How To Increase Page View In 6 Simple Steps.

After a visitor comes to your blog and reads a post, where do they go next? In an ideal world, you want them to stay on your blog to read more.

If they don’t know you have anything more to offer though they will leave and become another bounce rate statistic. There are ways to encourage visitors to look around your blog. Whilst some blogs do this well, others fail miserably.

Over the past few months, I’ve been reviewing the way I do things and looking at how to increase page views on my blog. Inspiration has come from many sources good and bad.

I’ve put together six quick and easy tips on how to increase page views. Some may seem obvious but there are blogs out there I’ve visited that don’t do any of them. I came away from all those feeling frustrated!

HAVE AT LEAST ONE INTERNAL LINK IN EACH POST

As your blog grows and you write more posts, it’s important to have an internal linking strategy. It’ll help not only your visitors to find other relevant material on your blog but also search engine spiders.

If you have certain pages that you want to emphasise on your site, link to those more often to show search engines their significance.

I’m sure as you’re writing, some of your older posts spring to mind that you could link to. Ana Hoffman has a useful spreadsheet she put together to make life easier when it comes to internal linking.

Since I moved to Web Synthesis for hosting, I now have access to Scribe (aff link) which helps this process too. One of the features of Scribe allows you to search for the most authoritative, relevant posts on your site to link to.

INCLUDE RELATED ENTRIES AFTER EACH POST

If a visitor reads right to the end of a post then it would be a waste if you didn’t give them some suggestions for more reading.

You want them to complete the call to action you’ve added to the end of your post first and  then spend more time on your blog.

Having related entries after each post will encourage an increase in page views and at the same time a decrease in your bounce rate.

I use the nRelate Related Posts plugin because it gives me flexibility in design and settings. It doesn’t slow down my site because nrelate do all the processing on their servers. It also let’s search engines crawl the links for added SEO benefits.

USE YOUR SIDEBAR WISELY

Havings ads in the sidebar is a common way for people to try to monetize their blogs. If those ads aren’t converting well though maybe it’s time for a rethink.

If you’re not sure how to increase page views on your blog, an effective way is to include popular or featured posts in your sidebar.

My preference when it comes to the measure for popular posts would be on page visitors rather than the number of comments on the post. The latter doesn’t show popularity with visitors over time, merely that people chose to comment.

That’s why I use the nRelate Popular Posts plugin. It allows you to show the most popular posts on your blog measured by the number of visitors to each post. It also has exactly the same benefits as the nRelate Related Posts plugin I mentioned above.

INCLUDE A SEARCH BOX

One of the things I find most frustrating when I land on a site is the lack of a search box. Visitors might like what you’re writing about but if they have no way to look any deeper into your site then they more than likely won’t.

That’s why I think it’s essential to have a search box on your blog. You can also link your search box to your Google Analytics account. This allows you to get statistics on the keywords people are searching for on your site.

ADD AN ARCHIVE PAGE

This is a great way to encourage more page views on your blog. You can show all your posts in one place and showcase everything you’ve written.

I use the Genesis Widgetized Archive plugin to show my posts by date and category as well as showing the last 50 posts in a list.

START HERE PAGE

I’m working on a Start Here page at the moment for my blog because I think it’s a good way to point new visitors in the right direction.

You could introduce yourself with a video and tell people what your blog’s all about. You could steer people towards your popular posts. Use your imagination to draw people deeper into your blog.

DO YOU HAVE ANY THOUGHTS ON HOW TO INCREASE PAGE VIEWS?

So, those are some of the ways I think can be used to increase page views but what do you think? Are there any ways that you find work well to encourage visitors to look deeper into your blog?

Let’s discuss it in the comments section and come up with a useful list for everyone.

I’d be grateful if you’d share, Tweet, pin and stumble this post if you found it useful.