Site traffic and WordPress Themes
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Among the various themes available on wordpress.com for choosing without upgrades, is there a particular theme that generates more traffic or places your site higher on google than others? Or are all the themes pretty much the same in terms of SEO?
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Have to say: themes which automatically truncate the posts with the Read More tag, and the Monotone theme, will ultimately reduce your readership. Monotone is anti-SEO as far as I can see, although that’s a side-effect rather than a deliberate feature. If you can’t use widgets, you can’t keep people on your web page, nor can you effectively direct them to other sites in a theme that doesn’t allow blogrolls and doesn’t let you post text effectively.
Otherwise, they’re pretty much all equal.
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What’s wrong with the Read More tag? I use it in most of my posts; is that going to affect it?
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Yes, it is. Most people will NOT click it. That means that while people may come to the front of your blog, over 80% are not going to click through and read an entire post. Every block you put in the way of readers getting to your blog and reading will cost you readership.
Several of my good friends started using Read More on their blogs. I don’t read their blogs anymore.
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Hm… I never knew that. Thanks for the advice. But I really can’t think of a way to condense the front page.
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Thanks, and you’re welcome. Remember, people don’t come to a blog for the design, or the fact the main column is the same length as the sidebar. They come because it’s fascinating to them. Make it easy for them to be interested in what you say, and they’ll come back.
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Hmm … I’m the opposite – I’m more likely to click away from a site when I see a collection of long, long posts — just takes too much effort to keep on scrolling down forever to see the next one — I prefer to see the title + a little something, then I click on the “read more” tag.
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@arcadata – I’m with you. The big, mega-successful blogs with many posts per day that I visit would be an absolute mess if their front pages had the entire posts and I’d never scroll them. Small or large, I want to see what’s new quickly and if I click for a big blog, why wouldn’t I click for a small one?
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Stats are, fewer than 20% click through a Read More, which is why the most successful blogs in the world tend to have posts of 300 or fewer words. So they can all go on the front page.
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Where is that stat from? I can’t think of a single “most successful” blog (HuffPo, Gawker, etc) with full posts. Of course, I don’t read all the most successful, nor know which they are.
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Look at Gawker.com; they are ALL Read More posts. They say stats are up by about 24%, but that includes not only all of the hits for Gawker.com, but also all of the hits for Defamer.com and Valleywag.com and Jezebel.com, so they’ve smooshed four blogs into one and only increased hits by a net of 24%. Insofar as I understand the hits on those blogs when they were independent, this is a serious decrease of readership. SERIOUS.
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The most successful blog in the world is Perez Hilton’s, and virtually all his posts are right there on the front page. If you read essays, whether you read them on the Huffpo or the New Yorker, you’re very much an atypical blog reader.
The stat I got from, if memory serves, the Pew Research Centre.
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Also, you can see Boingboing, which has far as I know never used that Read More except on Xeni’s 18000 word epistles from Whateveristan.
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I’m probably an atypical many things!
I don’t consider clicking to a post to be equivalent to reading an essay. And Gawker might have started losing readers before the smoosh. It’s not the must-read for many that it used to be. (Perez Hilton doesn’t have many words.)
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I’m going by the top blogs listed on Technorati. They don’t use the Read More tag. And user research on whether or not people do click through. I wouldn’t buy a book that made me go to a different section of the store to read Chapter Two, and in this I am dead typical.
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I think the type of information conveyed, the reason for seeking it and target demographics probably come into play. Whatever the factors, I’ve never considered clicking my mouse to be a burden. If I want to know more, I click. I’m just a simpleton that way, I guess.
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