Helping visitors browse your content, Part 2

May 31, 2007

This series of articles is about helping your visitors find the information they want, or you want them find, as quickly as possible. The easier your site is to browse, the longer visitors might stay.

In part 1 of this series I compared blogs to libraries to emphasize how important it is to provide search options on your blog. I also mentioned the use of Google Adsense for Search to monetize your search. The income of this source is not much, but every penny (cent) is welcome, I assume.

Internal links

When people link to your blog, they usually link to a specific post. A visitor entering your site through that page will generally just read the article and go back to where they come from. One way of keeping them on your blog is to give them links to other posts to follow.

Constantly linking to other posts will not only keep your visitors a little longer on your blog, it can also help fight blogging’s biggest problem: most of the best content gets lost on almost every blog out there. Some of your best posts can be brought to attention again.

Internal links can help your individual posts with their individual Page Rank. The more you link to articles, the stronger their reference in the search engine indexes. This is good for getting better search results for that particular post.

Not linking internally can also drive people away. I wrote on Rehuel punt kom about an instance when I tried to find other parts of a series, but due to the time it consumed to look for the parts, I left the site. And I’m sure this happens to most visitors.

One good way to link internally is by adding a list of Related Posts at the bottom of your post. I’m using Aizatto’s Related Posts plugin to display them on my blog and in my RSS feed. Sometimes the relation is not perfect, but at least you have a number of internal links.

In the next article in this series I will about listing your best posts and categorizing your content.

This article is part of the Helping visitors browse your content series. Please check out part 1 for the introduction.

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