When starting out, most bloggers believe that it is super difficult to get people to your blog. While most expert bloggers think that getting people to your blog is the easy part. Getting the users to stay on your site is harder. Most users come to your site and ultimately go away without even going to the second page. When a user leaves without even going to the second page, it increases your bounce rate. It also reduces your pageviews per visit. On a larger body, it lowers your ad revenue.
In this article i will share with you tips and tricks that will help to increase your page views and reduce bounce rate in WordPress.
Before we start
WHAT IS BOUNCE RATE?
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who enter your site, and "bounce" (leave the site) rather than continue to view other pages within the same site. Page view is a request to load a single page on a website. We use Google Analytics to track our data. You are welcome to use another analytics service, or you can just google analytics installed on your WordPress site as a plugin.
If you are running a site that primarily denominated money through banner ads, then the number of page views matter. If you try a loyal audience, then build the number of bounce rate issues. Also, the lower your bounce rate, the better eCPM ads (cost per thousand) or CPC (cost per click) you will get. When the same user views the next page, your ad provider has probably therefore a better ad to serve them giving you a higher eCPM or CPC.
We have consulted with many customers to help them increase their page views and reduce bounce rates. We've also done a lot of experiments on our own sites . So all the methods we will share are the ones we have used in the past and know that they work. Note: These techniques will only work if you have good content.
Interlink Your Articles.
Anytime you can interlink your other posts within the post content, you are going to see an increase in page views. In WordPress 3.1, coupling was even easier because you can just search for the message you want to link, while adding links. Interlinking techniques work great if you have a site with many items. If you're just starting out, you'll be a little limited. So how do you go back and connect older articles if you have anything new? You can do this manually, but it will take some time. There are plugins that can automatically link keywords in WordPress (Although this article is to show you how we did this for affiliate links, you can use it for internal links purposes too). Not only help connect themselves to increase page views and reduce bounce rates, it also helps with SEO too.
Show Related Posts After The Post
One of the main reasons for the user to leave your blog after reading the post is because you do not show what they do. By presenting the user with a list of "related posts" or "another popular posts", you can get them to go to visit another post in your site. There are many ways you can add related posts on your blog. You can use a plugin called YARPP that its advanced algorithm that picks up used the related post. You can display related posts by category or tags without using a plugin. You can also display related messages show other messages from the same author.
Show clips on Front/Archive Pages
Showing clips on front/archive pages have two advantages. First, it reduces loading time. Secondly, it helps in increasing page views. You would almost never show full posts on your front page or archive page. Imagine with the 25 images in a heading, and then have five of them on one page. It would be a terrible user experience for (slow load time and super long page), which would allow the user to leave your site. Most good theme frameworks like Thesis, Genesis etc. already built this option.
Breakdown Long Messages
Are you writting long messages? Well, you can split into multiple pages using the WordPress tag in your post. Simply add where you want, and will split your message into multiple pages. You should be very careful when doing this, because if you could not have a sufficient amount of content on each page, the user can get angry. We have many big name sites like Forbes, NY Times, Wall Street Journal and seen others use this technique.
Interactive Sidebar
Sidebar can play a crucial role in increasing page views and playing reduce bounce rate. You can show your popular posts in the sidebar. You can even customize popular posts per week, month, to show all the time. You can also share your most recent posts only on single post pages. We have sites that use custom images to navigate given to specific positions in them. You can integrate other parts of your site in your sidebar.
Encourage Random Browsing
During our experiements on our wordpress blog we created a feature called I feel curious. When a user clicks on this button, they are redirected to a random post in WordPress. We put the button in our header bar, which was a very hot spot. When we started doing that, we faced a lot of criticism. People said that sites like these fail to grow because it is difficult to keep a loyal audience. We asked around and a lot of people who had done something similar in the past reported that the bounce rate for a siimlar site is increasing in 80% range. Average user would display only one page per visit and leave. We started with the site to get some basic information. Our bounce rate was in the 75% range. We slowly started to implement the above changes. Bounce decreased from an average of 76% to 42%. Our pageviews per visit increased to 2.80/pages per visit. The average time was spent on pages to the average of 3 minutes and 50 seconds << This is the average time that one million unique visitors for us! What do you do to increase page views and bounce rate? To share with us and do not forget to share with other bloggers.