Link It Forward
Back in March, I wrote an article on how to interlink to increase your page views and why page views are important. I wrote it from a monetization perspective, but the concept works for non-monetized blogs as well.
When you write a new article, you should always link to any past articles which may be relevant to the topic at hand. This will always increase page views. What you should also do and you may not have thought of this, is to go through your past articles and link to newer articles that may be relevant to those topics. You should use interlinking, if possible, or add additional text to indicate you've written more about those topics in later articles.
I'm as guilty as the next blogger when it comes to taking care of details like these. I'm currently using a "similar posts" plugin to do the dirty work, but it's not always accurate and lists articles that aren't relevant at all. Other bloggers are using similar plugins. What I'm planning to do is to go through some articles every day, starting at the beginning, and updating each one (if applicable). I also plan to use conditional code to defeat the "similar posts" plugin for the pages where I'm going to directly add the links for bona fide related articles. I just looked at the number of articles I've written since I started the blog and it's over 900. It's going to take me a long time to catch up.
Interlinking backward should be done as you write each new article and interlinking forward on old articles should be done on a regular basis. Checking for relevant articles that you can't effectively interlink should be done at the same time. Don't do as I have done and wait too long to go through past articles. Do it at least once per month so you don't have that many articles to go through. Even as you write new articles, think about whether they're relevant to the old articles and update the old articles at the same time. It'll save you a lot of work and can only help your page views.
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Hadn't thought about the updating and linking forward from past posts … duh. Excellent advice. I do link to previous posts from time to time, but I'll need to be more diligent in that area, too.
I have been doing this interlinking for quite sometime. But unfortunately I haven't noticed any increase in pageviews (Average pageview is around 1.6 per visitor)
Try adding related articles like I did at the bottom of this one. I'm keeping a database of links with topics so that I can plug them in as I go. I just started it, but it'll make it easier to add to existing posts.
I've done exactly same…I do it manually and relevance is always 100%. Still, most of the readers who come from search engines leave once they get what they want (or as soon as they decide that they may not get what they want).
My observation is that only small percentage of readers care to spend more time checking other articles.
The last I checked, I was averaging 9 page views per person for the last week.
Other than interlinking and related pages, about the only thing you can do is give your most popular posts more prominence up above the fold.
I've not been big on "interlinking" but I'm trying to give some of my past posts more prominence by writing a series of "blast from the past" articles.
I'm very lazy at this kind of thing, though…
That's what I really need to do, link old posts to newer ones. Just thinking of the number of posts makes my head spin though heh. Great reminder, thanks.
This has worked quite well for me too
I now post a button on all my counselling and hiking posts that link back to all my previous posts on those subjects.
Another reason why i am glad that i labeled all my posts, it makes it easier to find relevant ones.
Great Tip!
I saw that on your blog. Good idea. I have way too many categories to even try to do something like that.
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