I’ve never been a stranger to experimenting with different situations on my blog to increase my visibility and reach. With the constant thoughts of making something better, I continually share my results with you.

Last week I read a great deal of books, eBooks, and posts about page views and bounce rate of blogs. Both equally talked about are important numbers for bloggers to know of their site to change how their visitors receive information that they give.

Consider that if a new visitor hits your site and doesn’t find what they’re looking for, they’re going to head elsewhere to get their information. Likewise, it’s equally important that once they have found the information from your site that you keep them there to give them even more information on any number of topics they may be looking to take in information on.

After reading so much material on page views and bounce rate I considered how my own blog looked to new visitors. To test some thought processes and theories, I sat down Joanne, my wife (and brand new blogger) and asked her a simple question:

Looking at my magazine style theme, can you tell me how to get to yesterday’s post?

From the moment I asked the question I began counting. It took her more than 11 seconds to realize both courses of action to get to yesterday’s post and tell me.

a) click through on today’s post and use the “recent articles” navigation.

or

b) click on archives at the top of the site.

Guess what, 11 seconds was too long! Time’s up, I’ve lost a visitor!

Page views and bounce rates can be measured based loosely on some of the following elements:

• Navigation
• Image Queues
• Search Functions
• Post Excerpts

Taking my own knowledge from blogging, having multiple blogs, and using a wide variety of themes on I’m Blogging That… I thought we’d go for a little experiment.

Currently, my average bounce rate is 43.44%. Because 44% of my overall traffic is from search engines, I consider this to be a good number. Visitors arrive, grab their information, and go. I’m OK with that but do those visitors ever see that I may have related posts that will expand on the information that they’re here to get?

On the same token, my daily average page views is 5.1 pages. This varies from day to day by looking at my various means of metrics but overall, it’s a really high number. I attribute this a lot to my deep linking within posts, my post trackbacks, and having a niche blog that focuses on just one topic.

But, what if I could learn to make these numbers even better and show you how too?

Let me not deceive you, when I changed to my magazine style theme, my page views increased and my bounce rate decreased. But my question remained: would another theme and further optimization enable something better?

For the next 2 months, I’m going to test it and find out.

The newest theme (still with the same design and images) is up on I’m Blogging That now. Thanks to my fabulous business partner Mindy who took my ideas for the free Mag on Wood (went with Gossip instead, I found the coding better with Gossip by WPDesigner and needed SP’s strong coding skills to make this blog what I wanted) WordPress theme and tweaked it to my specifications to maximize the potential here.

Because of my experiement, there’s a few things that I have changed with the theme to see if all factors will play a role in page views and bounce rates:

• Paged Navigation

You may notice this down at the very bottom of my pages. Instead of “previous” and “next” posts, there’s now page numbers.

• Index Page Search

Previously my search bar was not on the index page. Is this really such a good idea? Now, it’s everywhere!

• Optimized 404

Should you reach a 404 page I now give the option to contact me to talk about what you’re looking for, browse the archives, categories, or search the site.

• Post Excerpts

By displaying post excerpts on the index page I’m able to increase the posts on the index page to 7. This is 3 more than the magazine theme displayed.

• Custom Images

Every post excerpt has a post image that goes along with it. This is to grab your attention and draw you in.

Aside from the above changes, I’ve also done more to create a “call to action” with my RSS subscription options in the sidebar and at the end of each post.

Will it work? I won’t know until I have enough data to stack against previous months but I suspect that the new template style my accomplish exactly what I’d like to have: higher page views and lower bounce rate.

IF this theme proves to help aid those goals, it is here to stay. IF the results are the same or better, I’ll be reverting back to my magazine style theme.

And because this is such a great topic, don’t think that we’ll end talking about increasing page views and lowering your bounce rate here. Oh no, seems to me we just may have another post series on our hands. Stay tuned.