If you follow the instructions in this post, you’ll learn more than you expected to, including my surprise when I found out something I didn’t know that kept people reading through my blog posts. (Hint: I do it in this one.)

You want more traffic, but you also want to keep readers on your website as long as possible. The longer they stay, the more chance there is that they’ll subscribe or buy.

But engagement is worth more than that. The search engines look at how long your visitors stay and rank you accordingly in search results. That’s because they think viewers will want to go to websites that others spend more time on. So the longer your visitors stay, the more traffic you’ll get.

What can you do to keep people on your website?

Of course, you should make your content useful and interesting. But people skim through posts pretty quickly. Here are 3 things you can do to keep people longer on your website:

1. Include internal links to other pages on your website
2. Include videos
3. The surprise I didn’t know about until I finished writing this post!

1. How internal links help your traffic

When you link to other blog posts or pages on your website, visitors who click through stay on your website longer. As I mentioned above, the search engines like this and reward you by ranking you higher in searches.

Secret tip: You can multiply this effect by linking to your most popular posts. This works because these pages have content that people are searching for and are interested in, so people are more likely to click on links to them.

In my post, “Increase your website traffic with this simple technique,” I explain how to discover which pages get the most traffic. (And, as you see, I’m adding an internal link.) That page is also one of my posts that have the longest view time. Why? It has a video. (Read on.)

Watch this video to learn how to increase traffic by finding posts with the longest time spent on them. Read More