When I relaunched my blog on its own domain (moving from Wordpress.com), I added Google Analytics to the website to collect some statistical data on how well my new blog is doing. After about a week, I noticed that the overall bounce rate for this website was a whopping 85%, which means hardly anyone stayed to read more than a post! Why did this happen?
The reasons are manifold. In an effort to keep the site as simple as possible, I had used only two blocks on the blog. One for navigation, which listed all the categories of posts and the other for the recent comments. Once someone reaches the blog through a search engine, they read the post, left a comment if they wanted, and moved on, since nothing else seems to be there in the website.
After reworking my blog a little, the bounce rate has now reduced dramatically to 50% within a weeks time! How did I do it? It was simple and did not take more than a couple of hours to optimize the site. Here is what I did:
- Created more visibility to the blog. I created a Popular posts page and added this as a tab to the menu bar. I picked the top posts indicated by Google Analytics and listed them on this page. Anyone landing on this blog will definitely notice the "Popular Posts" page and is likely to read this section. This means more page visits to your popular articles. Most blogging software allow you to create a popular posts page or navigation block automatically.
- Added a Recent Posts section. Another eye-catching block. This will show your last few blog entries. Giving an attractive title to a blog post can automatically increase page visits. If you are writing a series of articles, mention the "part number" in the title of the post. This will make the reader aware that he is reading just the part of a longer series and is likely to read the rest of the articles from the series. He/She may even add your feed to their RSS readers.
- Created plenty of cross links. It is very unlikely that your readers will read all your past articles by visiting the archives section. This is where cross linking comes in. You can link to your previous posts in a new article, if they are relevant. Please be judicious here. If you are over enthusiastic, you may loose some readers.
- Added "Related Posts" to all posts which had related content. I introduced a new series called "Smartphone Watch" recently. At the end of every article, I added a 'Related' link to link back to the other articles in this series. Now I notice that almost everyone reads the entire series instead of just one post. Wordpress and Drupal have related posts plugins which can automatically pickup and display this at the end of every post. Look here for a detailed discussion on such Wordpress plugins. Drupal module is here.
Thats all I did! My bounce rate is continously reducing after I introduced these changes. Try these with your blog too. You will definitely notice an improvement in your page views.
