Recently I've decided to change the layout for one of my blogs. This is a blog about free stuff including contests, promotions, sweepstakes and lots of freebies and it is in focused on offers available on Portugal. This blog has a few hundred regular visitors and half of the traffic is brought via search engines.
When I update my blog (it's not necessarily evry day) I can update it with 2, 3 or even 10 new offers each one in a separate post. People who visits the blog frequently don't even need to leave the first page of the blog to see the new offers with all the details and click on the links that lead them to the offers page (outside the blog).
What I have done on the change of layout was to don't show the post content on the first page (or archives page). Instead of that I will show only the titles and the number of comments for that post. As many times it has been said here, titles are very important, and as people want to win things, they will often want to see the details for all of the offers, but to do that with my new design, they will need to click on every title and then get back to the main page and proceed to the next entry. This way, I increased my pageviews by 15 times and my clicks by 5 times, although I decreased the CTR by 3 times.
This way, the adsense is much more targeted, because they will show adds relevant only for that post and the visitor will see a lot of different adds, increasing the odds that one of the adds will fit him/her.
You may say I am reducing the usability of the blog, but that's not necessarily true, because now the first page is like a directory of all the offers and it is easier for the visitor to browse them without reading all the text of the non relevant offers and besides that the page loads faster, becaus most of the entries have an image and now, there is no image on the first page.
Directories and well done
Directories and well done multi-link pages can perform very well, for you, your readers and for ads.
The key factor is to decide which page to show as homepage when people come to your domain. I know many pages which do very well by showing the 'about' page first and from there the navigation links to the blog. This is very helpful if you have a business and use your blog to draw attention on your services.
I tend to show excerpts on the main page, to diverse subject areas in sections, to offer multiple ways to get content from the archive and to optimize dynamic sub-pages for single keywords (tags).
The success is that SE traffic is coming in >95% directly to highly relevant pages. The funny thing is that my homepage is on place 6 for the last week in my PMetrics post views statistic. I am not relly sure if that is good or bad.
Peple interested in my articles follow via RSS and only get the excerpts. That's the same like homepage minus the pictures.
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