Getting traffic to visit our blog requires a lot of work, and making sure that traffic stays requires good content! Sometimes, though, we needlessly send traffic away even though we want them to stay! Here are some of the ways that I’ve found that sends traffic away:

1. too many ads – sometimes we place ads to get clickthroughs or sales, but we tend to give them preference over our content. In other words, we spend a lot of effort getting visitors, they visit, see ads and click away almost as quickly!

2. too many external links – perhaps our blogs have too many links on them that encourage visitors to click away. I’ve seen blogs that have lots of dozens of entries in the blogroll, each one is a temptation to click away, if the current post isn’t what you are interested in.

3. poor design – we all add features to our blogs like mailing lists, comments, purchasing plugins, etc. but we need to make sure that when we use these features, we don’t inadvertently send traffic away, by forgetting to enable options that send the customer back to your website. Here is a good example in the jpeg of a website that had a mailing list, I entered my name, and was taken to this page, but what do you not see? A way to return to the previous page, just an invitation to click to close the page. Boom! Visitor gone.

4. slow loading pages – often new bloggers add all sorts of crap on their new blogs to make sure that their new blogs look old. In fact, more often than not, new blogs look exactly new for that self same reason. But a much bigger problem is that, for various reasons, if the items aren’t loaded on your server, they must be taken from somewhere else. Quite often, these images will slow your server down; and occasionally, may prevent your pages from loading at all – I’ve had problems with Adsense in the past, Adbrite (too awful to mention), Payperpost Affiliate images, etc. And remember, millions of people still DON’T have broadband!

What other ways do we send traffic away? Have you ever made that mistake? Tell us your ideas!

If you have already fallen victim to Google’s Supplementals Hell, you’ll be scratching your head wondering how to get out of the trap!

Well, when I found out that Google not only scans the main page of your blog, but also the archives, the categories, etc.. and naturally it finds a lot of pages or posts that are the same or surprisingly similar! One easy solution is to cut the number of categories that you put your posts in! I used to publish my posts in 2 or even 3 categories, but of course this would simply increase the number of duplicates found by Google! So now one post – one category! Of course, what do you do with nearly 500 back posts, most of which are double or triple categoried! Well, you have to go back and clean up the mess! And you can use the plugin Post Control to change categories for upto 50 posts a page ! Not so difficult, either.

You may also wish to remove other ways that you can find your posts, such as changing the  permalinks, not allowing posts to be found by date views as well! Keep experimenting! I’m busy doing this, but still no significant change on the Supplementals for me! Still nearly 50% are in the supplementals!
Series of Postings

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Step one in my short series about getting out of supplemental hell.

First step, I found out how many pages were actually hidden there. I found originally that it was over 52% of my pages. And the more I published, the more I found there. I have done comparisons with other blogs, and many have had similar results, but one or two have only 5 pages residing there out of over 325! Now that’s a rate I could live with!

Why is it important? This diverts traffic away from your pages because so many results that could bring up your blog are no longer being listed in the main pages. You could drive additional search engine traffic as a result of this! In my case, I suspect I could double my page views from Search Engines.

So, I found this great tool that I used to get the basic data. It’s called SEO for firefox. Click and read about the plugin for FF. It’s well worth it! Sorry, if you aren’t one of the 65% of readers who use FF for reading this blog! There may or may not be a tool for IE, but if you know about one that does a similar job, do drop me a line!