Bloggers are interested in a lot of statistics when it comes to measuring the success of their blogs. For some it’s all about RSS subscriber numbers, for others it’s about ‘Unique Visitors’ and for others it’s about the dollars and cents that they earn from their blog.

One metric that I keep a close eye on is ‘Page Views’. Another related one is ‘Pages Viewed per Visitor’.

While all of the metrics mentioned above are important I am interested in how many pages each visitor to my blog views for a variety of reasons – two of the important ones being:

1. It’s a measure of reader engagement – if a reader comes to my blog but only views one page it is an indicator to me that I need to work harder on engaging my readers and drawing them into participating in my blog. While they might have left satisfied (having quickly the found the information that they needed) I failed to draw them into commenting, viewing other related information, participating in a poll or some other activity that takes them a step closer to becoming a long term and loyal reader.

2. It impacts CPM ad earnings – when I run a CPM (cost per impression) advertisement on my blog it is in my best interests to create as many page views as I can. I get paid every time an ad is viewed – and one of the best ways to increase these earnings is to increase the ‘pages viewed per visitor’ metric.

How to Increase Page Views on Your Blog

1. Quality Content – before I get into some specific tips for increasing page views let me state the obvious and link it to the quality of your content. If you write engaging, useful and informative content you’ll give your readers every reason to want to read more of the same. On the other hand if your content is boring and of a low content – it’s no wonder that they only hang around to view just a single page.

2. Comments – the simplest way to get a reader to view more than one page is to get them to leave a comment on your blog. In doing so they hit the submit button in the comments section and the page reloads. Congratulations – you’ve just doubled your page view numbers! Of course this isn’t always easy to do but you might want to consider some of these techniques for getting more comments.

3. Interlink Your Posts – another very natural way to grow your page views is to give readers links within your posts to other posts that you’ve written on your blog. This isn’t always easy in the early days of your blog as you might not have many posts in your archives to promote in this way but after a while you’ll find that it becomes easier and easier as your posts will overlap with one another. These types of links within posts should only be done when they add value to the post – irrelevant links just left to increase page views will just frustrate your readers.

4. Highlight Related Posts At the End of Posts – a great place to highlight other posts that you’ve written on the topic is at the end of your posts. Readers come to the end of a post and ‘pause’ before they decide what to do next. To stop them hitting the back button on their browser if you’re able to position something relevant to read in these places that they pause you might just draw them deeper into your blog.

5. Compilation Pages – Jennifer wrote about creating a Best of Blog page for your blog a few days ago. In a sense what she’s suggesting is that you create a compilation page (I also call them Sneeze Pages) where you link to many other posts that you’ve written. Highlighting these pages in prominent places on your blog is a great way of driving people in many directions and deep into your blog. The bonus is that you’re sending them to your highest quality pages which increases the chances of them being converted to loyal readers.

6. Write a Series of Posts – putting together a series of blog posts that all relate to one another can bring a lot of life to a blog. For regular readers it can build momentum on your blog but over time it can be great for driving up page views because all of your posts are interlinked and draw readers who find the series to view each one, one after the other. A ten part series means someone reading the full thing sees 10 pages on your blog!

7. Interactive Elements – one challenge that many bloggers face is how to get readers who subscribe to their blog via RSS to actually visit their blog. If a reader reads your content in an RSS reader it means they have 0 page views. While I personally don’t get too stressed by this (I figure at least they are engaging with me) it’s not great for CPM advertising. One way to draw readers to visit your blog is to come over to comment – but there are other interactive tools that you can use also such as quizzes, projects or polls. Run these and post about them on your blog and you draw them to view a page or two.

8. Highlight Your Search Tool – most blogs have a search field somewhere on them that enables readers to look for more information. However I see quite a few blogs that have this search field hidden low on their page. This decreases the chances of it being seen and used. The more people searching for content on your blog the more likely they are to find something else to read.

9. Highlight Categories and Tags – similarly, if you highlight the category that a post belongs to or Tag it you again give readers something else to click on and read on a related topic to the post they’ve just read. In fact in doing so you link to pages where there are multiple more posts to read so you could be generating quite a few more page views.

10. Read More Links – on the front page of many blogs you’ll see just excerpts of posts show with a link under them that says ‘read more’ or ‘continue reading’. There are a few reasons to use this ‘excerpt’ or ‘extended entry’ feature of blogs. For me the reason I use it is because I want to highlight more than one latest post above the fold on the front page of my blog. I want to show readers at a first glance that there is a lot of content on my blog. However another added bonus is that you draw people to view a second page on your blog when they click the ‘read more’ link.

What would you add? How do you work to increase the numbers of page views on your blog?

*Darren Rowse is a guest blogger for Scribefire. He blogs professionally at ProBlogger, part of the b5media blog network.