When starting out, most bloggers believe that it is super hard to get people to your blog. Whereas 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 end up leaving 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 decreases your pageviews per visit. On a bigger picture, it decreases your ad revenue. In this article, we will share with you tips and tricks that will help you increase pageviews and reduce bounce rate in WordPress.

Before we start

Lets cover some basics regarding terminology and technology. Bounce rate represents the percentage of visitors who enter your site and “bounce” (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site. Page view is a request to load a single page on an internet site. We use Google Analytics to track our data. You are welcome to use another analytics service, or you can simply install Google analytics in your WordPress site.

Now that we have taken care of the basic terminology, you are probably wondering why the heck do these numbers matter?

If you are running a site that is primarily monetized by banner ads, then the number of pageviews matter. If you are trying to build a loyal audience, then the number of bounce rate matters. Also the lower your bounce rate, the better ads eCPM (cost per thousand) or CPC (cost per click) you will get. When the same user views the next page, your ad provider most likely has a better ad to serve them thus giving you a higher eCPM or CPC.

Important note: These techniques will ONLY work if you have Good Content.

Interlink Your Posts

Anytime that you can interlink your other posts within the post content, you are going to see an increase in pageviews. In WordPress 3.1, interlinking got even easier because you can simply search for the post you want to link while adding links. Interlinking techniques work great when you have a site with a lot of articles. If you are just starting out, then you will be a bit limited. So how do you go back and interlink older articles when you have something new? You can manually do it, but it will take some time. There are plugins that lets you automatically link keywords in WordPress (Although that article is showing you how we did this for affiliate links, you can use it for internal linking purposes as well). Not only does interlinking help you increase pageviews and reduce bounce rates, it also helps with SEO as well.

Show Related Posts After the Post

One of the main reasons why the user leave your blog after reading the post is because you are not showing them what to do next. By showing the user with a list of “related posts” or “other popular posts”, you may get them to go on to visit another post in your site. There are a lot of ways you can add related posts to your blog. You can use a plugin called YARPP that has its advanced algorithm that picks the related post. You can show related posts by category or tags without using a plugin. You can also show related posts by showing other posts by the same author.

Show Excerpts on Front / Archive Pages

Showing excerpts on front/archive pages have two advantages. First, it decreases page load time. Second, it helps increase the pageviews. You should almost never show full posts on your front page or archive page. Imagine having like 25 images in one post, and then have 5 of those on one page. It would be a horrible user experience because of (slow load time and super long page) which would make the user leave your site.

Splitting up Long Posts

Are you writing a super long posts? Well, you can split it into multiple pages using the WordPress <!–nextpage–> tag in your post. Simply add it wherever you want, and your post will split into multiple pages. You can see an example of how we split our posts into two pages or even into five pages. You have to be very careful when doing this because if you do not have a sufficient amount of content on each page, then the user might feel uninterested.

Interactive Sidebar

Your sidebar can play a crucial role in increasing pageviews and reducing bounce rate. You can show your popular posts in the sidebar. You can even customize it to show popular posts by week, month, all time. You can also show your most recent posts only on single post pages. We have seen sites that create custom images to navigate to specific posts of theirs. You can integrate other sections of your site in your sidebar.

Tags: Google analytics, increase Pageviews, Interlink, multiple pages, reduce bounce rate, related posts