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.
Advert: Hire me for Search engine optimisation consulting
Google Tutor Subscribe today for killer Google tips!
Permalink: How a redesign gained me 9000 blog readers