It pays to advertise

If you are a regular visitor here, you are a member of an elite group. Well, maybe not all that elite, but the folks who return often only represent 10-15% of daily visitors: the rest all land here from other web site links or from searching. The great majority come from Google and a very small number find their way here from MSN, Yahoo and Ask.

These search directed visitors used to be "gulp and go" types. That is, having arrived here at some page that Google thought was relevant, they would leave without reading anything else.

Alexa showed that in a most depressing way. They track a "Page Views Per User" statistic which is the "average numbers of unique pages viewed per user per day by the users visiting the site". For this site, the number seldom rose above 1.

That's no way to build popularity.

Well, what to do? In some ways, that behaviour is expected: search visitors found what they wanted (or didn't), so why look at anything else? Oh sure, a very few of them might be curious to see what else we might have to offer here, so once in a while that number would move up to 1.2, but that was pretty rare.

Because of my extreme brilliance, I found the soultion and have fixed the problem. Well, no, that's not quite what happened. Let's rephrase: I accidentally stumbled upon a solution and was surprised at the results.

What I did was add the sidebars that list "Latest Posts". As is so often the case, I did that with no purpose in mind: I had noticed other web sites doing something similar, thought "Oh, that's cool", and wrote the code. It was completely surprising to me when I saw that Alexa page views jumped markedly the day after I did that. In fact, they've been rising ever since and stand at 2.4 as I write this. That's a healthy improvement, and it's still going up.

If your web site could use some improvement in the "Depth of visit" category, consider adding something like this to your pages.

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Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them. I resell or can earn commissions from the sale of some of these items. Links within these pages may be affiliate links that pay me for referring you to them. That's mostly insignificant amounts of money; whenever it is not I have made my relationship plain. I also may own stock in companies mentioned here. If you have any question, please do feel free to contact me.

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