Page Views: Their Importance to Your Blog and Tips to Get More

As a newbie blogger, there are so many things to learn in the first few months of starting your own blog.

Page views are definitely not among the first of your worries, because the initial months are busy in setting up the blog, tweaking the design, getting people to know about your new blog and so on. Many newbie bloggers are even unaware of Google analytics code and get it installed quite later.

What Are Page Views? 

Page views are an important measure of the traffic received by your site and denotes the requests sent to the server to load that page. In simple terms it denotes the amount of times a page gets viewed.

How Do You Track Page Views?

Well the easiest and simplest way to keep a count of page views that your blog or site receives is to use Google analytics. You will need to set up a free account and then input your site details and get a tracking code.

This code needs to be installed on your site and verified. Once it is verified, you will start receiving free info about the number of page views and many other important criteria in your Google analytics report.

Difference between Page Views and Unique Page Views

Okay so now you know about page views. But if you have looked at your Google Aanalytics reports closely, you might have noticed an additional kind of statistics called as unique page views. Unique page views denote the number of times an individual visitor has viewed your page. No matter how many times he/ she tries to load the page, only one unique page view will be calculated.

Unique page views reflect the real picture about your traffic, but page views are considered more important.

Why Are Page Views Important?

Page views are important in more ways than one. First of all let us speak about advertisers. Google adsense is the most popular form of advertising, especially for beginner bloggers. Google adsense earnings are based on page views and clicks. So more page views obviously translate into more adsense earnings and that is something every blogger is looking forward to.

It is a good thing to increase page views even if you are not looking at the monetary aspect. More page views mean more reader engagement and that is something that every blog and its owner should aspire for. More page views will reduce your bounce rates and a low bounce rate is another benchmark for good blogs.

How to Increase Page Views?

By now you have understood the importance of getting more views per page and are desperate to learn techniques that increase page views. Here is a comprehensive list of methods that actually work and are super easy to implement as well:

1) Create Great Content

Great content always has and will remain the back bone of a good site. No matter what techniques you apply, you cannot lure your readers to stay on and read more of your content unless you catch their attention and interest. Keep in mind that all the other techniques detailed here to increase page views will work ONLY if your site has good quality, original and interesting content.

2) Display Excerpts Instead of Details

Excerpts serve a very important function. They first catch your attention and then boost your curiosity. You are tempted to click on the read more button to know what the author has to say more beyond the first 100 words of excerpt.

3) Use YARPP

Yet another related posts plugin or YARPP is a wonderful plugin that can make your life so much easier. But you need to be a WordPress blogger to make use of this plugin. What it does is to direct your reader to other posts that are related to your current post.

This not only encourages the reader to click on the links to read more, but also increases page views. This is a wonderful plugin to keep your old posts fresh and easily accessible to your readers as well. When you start out you may not have that many blog posts, but as time goes on and you keep uploading regular content, the older posts get pushed back into the dark corners of the archives and only the recent posts get displayed on the home page.

4) Put Your Sidebar to Good Use

Most of the bloggers have loads of widgets and ads loaded in the side bars, which may not do much in terms of increasing page views. Get rid of all the redundant stuff but make sure that you use the Popular posts widget here. This widget can brilliantly display your recent posts, most popular posts and most commented posts all together.

The popularity of the posts may be determined by number of views or number of visitors.

Choosing to display the popularity according to number of visitors will reveal the true picture because each unique visitor will be counted just once and no matter how many times he / she views that page later on, it will be ignored. Views on the other hand are counted irrespective of the ISP of the visitor and if the same visitor loads the page twice, it will be counted as 2 views.

5) Use Random Post Plugin

This plugin will provide links to random posts and is a wonderful way to showcase posts that are not classified as recent, popular or related.

6) Internal Linking to Related Phrases

When you create regular content on a particular niche or topic on your blog, it is but natural that certain phrases get repeated in your posts. For example, if one of my old posts is about how to track page views, I would link that post using a suitable anchor phrase from my new post on page views. This not only encourages readers to view more pages, but also gives them great value by offering them detailed info about a particular topic.

Synopsis

Page views are an important criterion in deciding the adsense revenue of your blog. This post has attempted to describe everything that you need to know about page views in a detailed and comprehensive manner. Please share it with your friends and followers using the social site and bookmarking buttons below.

Tags: beginner blogger, Blogging, Featured, google, increase page views, newbie, page, page views, start your own blog, your blog, your blog blog

Category: Blogging