Add A Recent Articles Section To A Blog
I added another component to my side menu bar. A Recent Articles section just under my RSS feed icon. It shows the most recent 5 postings.
Why Did I Add Recent Articles?
It is a bit of an experiment really. I enjoy going to other blogs via link to a specific page that I am interested in. It bypasses their homepage however and a recent articles section on every page lets me get a quick overview of what they are writing about right now.
Most of my traffic is coming from search engine results so the first page a visitor comes to is not my home page. I thought this would be another way to expose them to my current articles and maybe get them to stick around longer. I will keep an eye out for my page views per visit to see what happens.
What Else Can You Do To Encourage Longer Visit Times?
I have only really done two things in the past to encourage surfers to stick around.
Use Internal Links
And use a lot of them. I have been bad at this, but any article where I have used them has been fairly successful at keeping them around. If you have a related post that adds to an article, link to it. It is simple to do really. If the individual wants more information or is just hanging around then you will get another page view out of it.
Related Articles
At the end of each of my article's landing page I have a section called Related Articles. Basically, I used a database query function that acts like a simple search engine to find matches in my articles. I post the 5 most closely related articles and hopefully they find something that suits what they are looking for. If you want to know more about it, I wrote an article on how I did it called Add Related Posts Links.
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Category: Blogging
Original Post: Friday, November 30th, 2007
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