How a redesign gained me 9000 blog readers
Daniel has published an interesting post today discussing whether blogs should be displaying full posts or excerpts on the homepage. Personally I regard blogging as being very similar to publishing an online magazine so I would never go back to having full posts anywhere other than the individual post page. A reader being faced with huge pages that they have to scroll down to find content is just bad for usability not to mention SEO.
Last week Blogstorm had a redesign and it is interesting to see how the new magazine style homepage with bright images is helping with readership.
December 2007
Since the redesign
My homepage is viewed around 5,000 times a month on average, that’s 60,000 times a year. If I can improve the bounce rate by just 15% then that will equate to an extra 9,000 people reading the content of my site every 12 months.
Traffic to the homepage of a blog is usually very small compared to the rest of the site. Most people arrive at your individual post pages either from feed readers, search, social media or links from other blogs. Because of the low level of traffic to the homepage it is important to make the most of what you get and ensure visitors don’t leave and go elsewhere.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 6 comments below, or add your own!
Patrick,
That is really impressive, but I don’t think it’s the redesign that brought you all the new RSS readers, you’ve got to give credit to yourself for your writing too.
I think if I needed another reason to push clients to develop their blogs then this would be it.
But I think Nick’s right – but I guess each has it’s part to play.
Si
Uhhmm, how about a link to your home page in this post?
The homepage is just http://www.blogstorm.co.uk
Is it all custom done or were their plugins and such
The theme is just a free theme but I spent a long time making it look like it does. I altered a lot of php code myself and added a few plugins for managing comments etc.