With an open mind, try to figure out what people want and give them more of it. This is easy to say but how do you figure out what people are coming to your site looking for? Enter the magic of log file analysis tools like WebTrends or IPro. WebTrends is one tool of many that lets you see where people were just before they came to your site. These programs can tell you which pages on your site are the most common entry points and you can see a list of the most common search words people use to find your site. You may find some surprises in this information. Your main page is probably not the place most people enter your site. The bulk of your visitors are probably entering all over the place – not through your home page. You may find you have a whole bunch of people coming to the one little article you have on chocolate cake – a subject you had no idea much of anyone was interested in.

So get busy and write more chocolate cake and similar articles. Put links on your chocolate cake page to anything else you have that is remotely related – articles about pastry, other types of cakes, chocolate, cake icing, deserts in general. Make some little mini-articles you can link off to about cake pans or icing recipes or cake decoration. Build a little mini-Web site about cake and cross-link it all over the place. Or (pay attention now) break that ham or cake article up into several separate pages. They can probably be naturally divided into three or four sections. Make parts of the articles into sidebars people can click off to. If the articles are at all long, split them up into a series of pages (name each page differently and use different meta tag keywords on each page so they will be listed separately in the search engines). Try to make the article into a little mini-site so people will click through several pages in the course of reading it so you get more page views. Notice this article is a series of six separate pages. Obviously there are limits to how far you can carry this sort of thing before you start irritating people.

You may have been to some sites where articles have been split up into multiple pages you need to click through one-by-one to read the whole thing. This is almost always done simply to increase page views rather than because the site authors don’t believe in pages that scroll. With many articles you can split out sidebars, charts, graphs, etc., and create separate pages people will click to read – more page views. Try to make every article on your site a mini-Web site of it’s own within your larger site.

I’ve used WebTrends to check the traffic on a page, then divided it up and improved it like I have just described and then checked the traffic with WebTrends again. I find I am getting more traffic from the same visitors after the change – more page views, more ad views, more revenue.