It might sound totally daft, but by the simple process of reviewing your traffic logs you really can increase the traffic to your blog. What are you looking for and what do you do to increase traffic?

When we are talking about increasing website traffic we can increase it in two totally separate ways. The first is by increasing the number of new visitors to the site and the second is by increasing the number of pages each of your visitors are looking at. Both aspects will increase your overall visitor count.

What are your popular posts?
So we pander to the search engines and to new visitors alike in the first stage of the process. Look through your traffic logs and see which posts visitors have been looking at the most recently. You might want to look back over the last 7 days or the last month, it is up to you and really just depends on what levels of traffic you have and the how current your posts are.

Then simply write a post that talks about the top 5 or so posts by traffic and link to each of these posts. It is a simple trick. but new visitors arriving on your website will see it and be directed to some of the best content on offer. You might like to make the post ‘sticky’ so that it is always at the top of the home page, or write a new such post often or even a combination of the two (for example, write it each week and leave that week’s post as the sticky post).

Why does this help?
And what does this do for the search engines? Well you are also directing the search engines to your most popular posts. You are making sure that they can always find your best traffic posts. This works because not all search engines give the same results.

Time to review your work
At the same time look at your most popular posts. Actually open them and review them to see what they are saying. Are there any other posts on your blog, maybe written since that post, that explain part of the post in more detail? If so (and especially if the detailed post is not getting a lot of traffic) link to the detailed post. This is having the same double effect – search engines are being helped to find the posts that you want them to find and real visitors are being guided around your blog in the direction of where they can find more information. And by starting on popular posts, you know that a lot of people are reading these.

Sort high exit pages
Also, if you are using a statistics tool that shows exit pages, you can do the same trick there. Look at the high exit pages and see if you can suggest further reading from them to other posts. If you can’t then there is an idea for a new post! See if you can reduce those exits and give readers something else to ponder!

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