I had an excellent response from my newsletter request for questions (to sign up just use the form on the right or below), some of which I’ve responded to personally and some that I thought more could benefit. Two very smart people asked me the same question, essentially what are quick and easy ways to keep people on my blog longer?
“Quick and Easy” is the holy grail of course, and plugins always come to mind, so there are a few things a blogger can do.
Check your stats
If you have a stats/analytics program installed (like the excellent free Google Analytics) you will be able to see some very useful information. Relevant for this question are:
- Bounce rate. This is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. We can use this to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.
- Time spent on site. This is simply the amount of time spent on your site divided by the number of visitors. A low tie on site may mean people aren’t finding relevant content, or it’s not interesting enough.
- Where visitors are coming from. A high proportion of visitors from search engine traffic usually means a higher bounce rate and less time on site.
- Search keywords. What words are users searching for that are finding your site. Are they relevant to your site’s content?
These all link into our next point.
Write Relevant Content
You’re probably sick of people telling you to write good unique content. Well it’s still good advice, but it’s also good advice to write articles on the same topic. If a user comes to your site from a search for foreign coins, but finds the rest of your site is about handbags, they’ll not likely to hang around long.
Landing Pages Plugin
This plugin will recognise when a visitor has arrived from a search engine, and suggest other articles on your site based on the term they searched for. This can be downloaded from the Landing Sites plugin page →.
Related Posts Plugin
Similar to the above, but puts related posts at the end of each post, this gives a reader somewhere to go once they have finished reading your post. Related Posts plugin →.
What Would Seth Godin Do? Plugin
Seth Godin is an internet SEO guru who advocates using cookies to distinguish between new and returning visitors to your site. This plugin displays a small box above each post to new visitors containing the words “If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!” After 3 visits the message disappears. What Would Seth Godin Do Plugin →.
If you have any more questions please let me know. For more tips, sign up for my free weekly newsletter, by filling in the form below.
