Given that my current project is all about engagement, it’s probably not surprising that I’m more focused on engagement with my website than number of hits. Here’s my SEO strategy: write content, post regularly, give pages different names, insert images properly. That’s it.
However the bounce rate is more interesting – that’s the number of people who come, look at just one page, and leave. Another nice measure is average time on site (mine is a little over 3 minutes). Recently , I made some simple changes that reduced my bounce rate from around 70% to 50%.
- Adding related posts (I think this is the biggest change).
- Changing my theme and clearing up navigation. I really liked my previous theme, but the categories along the top weren’t working well. My new theme gives me two side bars, so I have more space there to list categories. I also added a link back to my main site.
- Changing the comments to Disqus.
- Adding a custom Twitter landing page where I mention that I don’t promote my blog on Twitter (so grab the RSS).
- Scheduling posts so they go out at 8am EST, every morning (except for Monday’s, which archives my Twitter feed and goes out a little earlier).
- Going through the navigation in Google Analytics and checking that all pages had the script that registers them (0% clickthrough is a giveaway).
Finally, did you know that in WordPress each category has it’s own RSS feed? Potentially handy if you blog on diverse topics, or in different languages.
Anything else I could be doing to improve engagement? Tell me what you want to see, in the comments or via Twitter.