I spent some time last night in two areas of my blog that most people don’t give much attention – my Archives Page as well as my Sitemap Page.
As you can see I added some clever (and fun) imagery, changed out some text, removed a few links that weren’t converting or providing much value, and added a section to cover my higher-value blog post series into each one, both from a user perspective and for the search engines to have another opportunity to index.
Total time to rework some of the content? About 30 or 40 minutes. Value to the end user and to my blog? It’ll actually be pretty significant, and here’s why:
Analytics (and People) Don’t Lie:
It is quite apparent that both search engines and people are clicking through to both of those pages at a significant rate. In fact, the Archives Page is one of the top 10 most visited pages outside of the proper domain and my About Page!
Not only that but my Google Analytics shows less than 50% bounce rate once entering into both of those pages – which means that people go there and they click more links, thus increasing my pageview counts – for that I’m very grateful.
But, I could do much better, and so I did by providing more content delivery to the blog post series and giving it a bit of flare with an image. It’s a win-win type of scenario where I increase the value back to the user by showcasing the content that matters most (while getting rid of low-converting clicks such as date-based archives in my case) and getting higher pageviews in return.
I like those types of scenarios, don’t you? The truth is that Google and my users like those pages, a lot.
What This Means For You (and Me):
The point of this post is to share (or remind you) that sometimes the smaller changes to your blog have the most dramatic and significant impact.
There are elements and pages on your blog that people are going to that could be optimized even further for even more engagement and pageviews. The nice thing is that you don’t have to spend a significant amount of time developing them or making them better!
The 30 or 40 minutes it took to optimize those two pages will increase clicks to the content that matters and will further develop the quality engagement in those posts for as long as they remain intact.
The challenge that you have before you is to identify the “low hanging fruit” opportunities on your blog to optimize even further for greater effect. Pages like your Archives Page and your Sitemap might be places to start.
What about some of your other pages too? Check your About Page, your Subscribe Page, and even your Contact Page (if you have one). The more you’ve got the more opportunity you have.
What about you? What are some pages that could use a bit of attention and love that you could really return to you some significant pageview increases?
Let’s hear it!
Looking over my posts etc is something I do weekly (over the weekend)Any advice on changing popular posts into pages within WordPress. I could have sworn I read that was better than leaving it a post. Maybe from Joost.
yoast did this to manage it better. i’m not sure i agree with it but it’s one way of handling it, for sure.
Word! This is wise words!
you are awesome.
I can how these small elements will effect the growth of traffic and how people search your site. Maybe I will take a look at my site and see if its common sense of me to change somethings like this.
“Black Seo Guy “Signing Off”
i think you found, … my blog.
(
I did this on a small scale for my blog – I wrote 2 articles about Tim Keller and Marriage and gosh I get hits for that all the time! So went back and fixed those posts to point to other relevant articles and promoted them. My bounce rate is starting to decrease. Love it. Now to get to the sitemap for humans.
Thanks for your tips! I’ve been using them for our web strategy sessions at my day job.
That is a great tip, Christina! I will have to do the same with my most trafficked posts.
I learned from the best (Tentblogger!) =D Glad you could catch the wave!
ah … thanks! made my day…!
seriously. great strategy.
awesome! rock it!
i’m glad you’re here!
Definitely something worth considering, especially to work on during a down time like this upcoming weekend! Timing is everything…
timing…….. is everything. and luck.
Awesome! I just added a site map to my site! I’m working now on the archives page! Hopefully I can get some more traffic from it!
sweet! did you finish the archives?
Woot! I’m on it!
It’s interesting how many people visit your archive page……good stuff to know!
seriously. it’s great stuff.
The subscribe page. I took notes from what you’re doing. Added text to image to make it more inviting.
sweet! good work. taking a look now.
Thanks John!
Thanks for the inspiration, and for making it so easy to create an Archives page in Standard Theme. I set mine up in minutes.
However, now I’m tweaking it. And I can’t seem to find a quick answer for this on your site or the forums.
I love how you’ve archived your Blog Series … what code do I need to include certain blog series?
i’ve manually added those with a ul and an li call.
This is a great tip. Sometimes the most useful things are staring us in the face! I would have over looked doing this I think. Thanks!
go for it! let me know what you optimize!
John, I have a question about feevy.com. I have made a dynamic blogroll with all the Christian Authors, Editors, Publishers, and Bloggers who want their blogs on the roll, but for some reason, those using WordPress and have hyphens in their blog addresses show up as empty feeds. (Both the atom and the rss feed addresses)
Would you help me to fix this, please? For now, it is only 3 blogs, but even one is too many.
Thank you so much!!
ah. i have only a little experience with feevy.
so it’s not accepting all the rss feeds in your system?
Sorry! computer vacation
Feevy is not accepting WordPress feeds when the blog address has a hyphen. All the others except http://www.tegeorge.com/Fiction/?feed=rss
I’ve tried viewing the page source and plucking the rss feeds direction from the source which worked on one blogger blog, but the wordpress ones don’t. I feel sorry for the 4 bloggers out of about 116 who aren’t on the roll.
ah. yeah, there’s probably little you can do here gina..!
I hadn’t even considered making an archive or site map page, but as I look at yours I can see how beneficial it would be to have one.
Thanks, John! You help me more than just about any other site on the net!
sure thing alex! trying to make your blogs better!
Sweet!
and spice!