Richard Hearne writes (a bit) about Search Engine Optimisation for Bloggers. One point that he made in his review of Pat Phelan’s (Roam4Free) site was how to help Google find your older content. Taking this advice, I’ve installed the WordPress Page Navigation Plugin on this blog – it’s the widget giving the ‘Page 1..2..3..end’ at the top of this site.
Without this plugin , all wordpress gives you by default is a single ‘previous page’ link. A user (or Google) might have to follow 15 or so links to get all your articles. Now it is all linked from the home page of your blog.
Almost as important as the number of visitors to the site, is what they do when they get there. You can see from the Google Analytics above , that the average visitor reads one and half pages on this site. (Is this Good? Is this Bad? – let me know) This could be multiple articles (there are about 20 per page), but the number isn’t really moving over time. I’m hoping the plugin can shift these numbers (up) even a little bit.
(Almost) Related Update and links (via Damien) : If you want to know more about SEO optimisation for WordPress, Matt Cutts of Google had a very interesting talk. A transcript of the video and a summary are also available.
Paul Browne 
Hi Paul
This plugin probably wont help you with your average page-views (which is probably in line or slightly above the average for a blog BTW). I would suggest adding something like a related posts plugin. I cant remember the name off hand (it might be ‘related posts’), but it adds links to a number of related posts at the end of each post page. Recent comments plugins (that display in the sidebar) are also good for increasing page-views.
The page navigation plugin is more to do with how you distribute pagerank within your site – it should help you keep more pages in the primary index.
Rgds
Richard
Richard,
Thanks for the clarification – I don’t think there is any ‘silver’ bullet to this, just loads of incremental improvements.
I had the related-posts plugin activated; around the same time I had possibly unrelated DB problems (fairly heavy load). I’m not sure if one caused the other , but getting the time to investigate is another matter.
Paul
Paul
There are a few templates and plugins that can help. Richard has mentioned a couple already – the problogger theme for example is a nice one as it makes your content a lot more accessible.
You can see it in action on blogcookbook.com at the moment – catch it quick before I migrate away from WordPress!
Michele
Michele,
Out of interest , why are you moving away from wordpress?
Paul
Paul
A number of reasons:
– security
– scalability
– sanity
– morals
Regards
Michele