One of the purposes of this blog is to have a look at the sorts of things that bring people to a web site.  I wanted to try different sorts of content to see what sorts of content attracts the most readers.

I mentioned in my post “How to increase hits on your web site” (http://www.haydnallbutt.com.au/2009/04/20/how-to-increase-hits-on-your-web-site/), that it was one of my goals to triple my readership over the coming year from its highest point last year.  This is well underway and I am hoping to achieve this goal by the end of this current calendar month, only two months into the year.  Before discussing it though I will present the data.

First complete month this year:

NB: The peak number is the first incidence of the highest number in this calendar month.

If you look back at the previous post (http://www.haydnallbutt.com.au/2009/04/20/how-to-increase-hits-on-your-web-site/) you can see the highest number of visitors to my site in any month was 55, achieved in March this year.  The April figures are nearly double this (and yes I still realise these are very small numbers as yet, but this is what I am trying to build).

This peak number is also a new record of unique visitors in any one day (previously 9).

The most viewed pages

The most often viewed page then is the first part of my how to assemble an infrared light source post which is way out in front of all the others.  This is followed by the posts on the Replaceable Rules and Starting a Company.

Interestingly the Infrared light source post was written on the 25^th of November 2008, so it has been since then that it has received 60 page views.  One of my latest posts on the Giant Microbe Toys was only written on 21^st of April 2009 and has already made it to the 4^th most viewed page.

On the other hand it is not all about how many arrive at your page, but how long they stay there when they do.  That sort of data will tell you what sort of content not only captures a reader’s attention but also holds it.  To rearrange the table in terms of average time spent on the page we get:

When we do that we see that the post on Starting a Company gets people to spend the most time reading the pages, followed by my post on my foray in the foreign currency trading (second place) followed by the giant microbes toy post (third place).  Interestingly the most often viewed page is actually only the 10^th longest viewed page.

Conclusions

In April I have increased the frequency of posting having made four posts this month.  This is double the number of posts in any previous month.  The number of visitors to my site has also almost doubled this last month.  This is not likely to be as a direct result of the four posts, but certainly I think that the volume of content on your site does increase the likelihood that your content will match the key words people are using to search the web.

In order to get people to stay on your site, the content also has to be meaningful.  Ie you have to have substance as well as quantity otherwise people will just bounce straightaway from your pages.  It certainly appears to be well worth taking the time to carefully craft the content on your pages to fit with your intended audience so that you give them every reason to stay on your pages and interact with them.

In the next post on blogging next month I will have a look at how it is people are finding my most popular pages and see if there is anything that we can do to help in that process.