I am always running the logs on my websites seeing where the traffic is coming from. One of my websites has a blog and I post to that blog almost every day. My initial set-up for that blog had seven posts on the homepage and the archiving was done weekly. After I had been blogging for a few months I felt that the archive menu was getting pretty long so I changed the archive setting to monthly. This reduced the number of archive pages on my site but surprise… blog traffic went up almost immediately. After doing some study I could clearly attribute the increase in traffic to keyword combinations between two different posts. For example, I might have blogged about “Garlic Baloney” on the 5th and “Peanut Butter Sandwiches” on the 15th. To my surprise I was getting traffic on terms such as “Baloney Sandwiches” – where the SEs found the parts of a single querry in two different blog posts. After deep snooping I found that almost 1/3 of my traffic is from these… let’s call them… “cross post keywords” (CPKs). This is bonus traffic since I would never have shown in the SERPs for any of these keywords while running the weekly archive.
Google seems to be much more effective at bringing me CPK traffic. Yahoo and MSN bring very few visitors from it. So traffic went up, but was that traffic happy to enter my site since they didn’t really find what they were searching for? I checked the “average visitor time on site” and it remained fairly constant. So either these CPK visitors read the blog like everyone else or spent their time on site searching for a topic that didn’t exist. I’ll assume that a little serendipity occurred.
To take this a step farther, I changed the homepage of the blog from a seven post length to a 20 post length. Average traffic went up there too and again the CPKs were hauling in the bonus.
I feel that the 20 post homepage is the best way to go since it makes my blog look like it has a lot more information and a wider variety of topics… and serendipity is a good thing. What do you think?
