This one is for all you bloggers or all you who intend to open a blog. If you have read Dev102 you probably saw that a couple of months back a lot of theme tweaks, moving stuff from here to there. I promised back then that I will tell you why we did that, so here goes.

We wanted to increase our number of page views. Back then we had about 1.20 page views per visit and we wanted to try and make that number grow. The changes to our theme were all test to see what will make people (you) stay and continue reading more posts and articles. We tried a lot of things but they were mainly two ways we tried to increase our page views, so here they come with their results.

1. I bet you all remember when Dev102 Looked like this: 

   

   There were some other variations of this but the main idea was the same, in order to expose readers (you again) to more content, We added on top of the post two rectangles, one had the top posts of all time rated by traffic and the other had the top posts this month, we were sure this will work after not seeing much improvement we decided to track how many readers (yet again you) clicked on those links. Check out our tutorial about How to track Link Clicks with Google Analytics. We discovered that less than 0.5% people clicked on those links, that’s it! obviously this method was not working

2. This method was the one that work and actually it is the easiest to implement as there is no CSS and PHP involved :). We have decided that while writing articles we will always keep in mind all the other articles we have wrote and try and link them together whenever possible. At first it was hard to do so but once you start having more articles linking is much easier. This method worked great, we now average around 1.6 page views per visit which is great!

The lesson learned here is that yet again content is the king! The more content you have, the easiest it will be for you to start linking you articles to one another (as long they are related of course). The result will be an increase of page views. There is another reason to do so and it is SEO. Google Search treats those links as regular links in terms of search results, so pay attention to the anchor text you provide those links and you can improve your search engine rankings.

Don’t forget to check out the Link tracking tutorial

Enjoy.

Amit.