How to increase your page views
1 page per visit = bad
That's the philosophy you need to adopt because someone who visits your site and doesn't view any other pages could mean one of several things. Either your navigation is rubbish, the content is rubbish or the visitor didn't find what he/she was looking for (and didn't see anything else on that page offering any site-wide value).
1 page per visitor is bad because it doesn't help you grow. True your traffic stats look fine but is your site suffering?
Multiple pages per visitor = good
Multiple pages per visit either means the visitors are enjoying your content, it's relevant to what they were looking for or your site invites people to click around. This is good because it means more impressions and a higher chance of contribution. If people enjoy your content, they'll return.
How do I improve my page views?
This was something I wanted to focus on when I redesigned the site. Previously I was averaging around 1.2 page views per visitor (probably less) because there was no clear link between articles. Because the site was fairly new I was unable to cross-refer between content and it was largely a one hit affair. You find the page through search engines, read it and leave it - whether it was relevant or not the behaviour is the same.
Related Material
This is a great way of cross-linking between articles - introduce a "Related articles" area that matches similar content by tag/title/topic because the chances are that if your visitor was reeled in on this topic then similar posts hold the most chance of securing them as a multi-page visitor. Multiple pages of good content can easily secure you a regular visitor.
Offer non-relevant links
I've found that showing the most recently commented articles is a great way of bringing old content back from the dead. Just because it's old doesn't mean it's not useful and if sufficient search engine traffic is sent through it then one visitor is likely to comment on the submission. If someone commented on it then it means it has use and is therefore brought into view (on non-article pages like the homepage, for space reasons).
Navigation/archives
This is something I should focus on more because if you view all the articles in the Linux category, you're presented with an ever-increasingly long list of submissions. This isn't pretty and I doubt it's useful but I'm unsure of how best to group them.
Having "Top Posts" is a good idea
This is something I realised while reading JohnChow.com - that having a "Top Posts" is a great way of presenting a blogging portfolio of sorts. First time visitors who are unsure of your quality can look here to see the best you have to offer. Therefore your most successful articles (or those of which you are most proud) should be placed here for all to see. Basically you're saying "the content is interesting, here, look".
Careful selection of your best material is key because there will be users on the brink of conversion who need that extra hint of excellence to subscribe to your RSS feed.
Conclusion
You want your visitors to read as many of your pages as possible because that's the reason of publishing content, isn't it? Using Seopher.com as a case study, I'm now averaging around 3.3 pages per visit by implementing the methods outlined above - which is a significant improvement over the 1.2 before the redesign.
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