Tips on how to become a premium member

How to up your pagecount, if you're almost there.

[jaxomlotus]

I'm tantalizingly within reach of becoming a premium member, but I've still got a ways to go.

I've been thinking of how to attain my goal, using the same traffic I already generate and have come up with a few tips:

1) Spread content over more pages. For instance, I have a highly-visited gallery of images displayed 20 per page. I cut that down to instead display 10 per page. This would double my page views. If this gambit works I may display 7 images per page... If that results in two extra pages per visit (plus the previous doubling of my pageviews) it's well worth it for me.
2) Display more options to visitors that will open up on a new page. Previously I displayed user comments on the same page as the gallery listing. I'm going to reconfigure it to open up comments on a new page (1 page per image).
3) Enhanced navigation. I'm in the process of desiging relevancy AI for my site. So if a user is on a page that displays monkeys, the AI will display related pages on my site that have to do with monkeys. Hopefully that will result in more pages visited on my site, especially amongst those visiting from search engine queries.
4) Add pages that generate unique content each time they are refreshed: For instance a fortune cookie generator or satirical headline generator ala The Onion. Warning: This might lower your CTR, unless the google ads are really good at matching ads to the unique page content. I'm personally not going to to do this.
5) Along similar lines to 4 - add HTML-based web games to your site. The for-fun addition of a game that needs to generate a new page each time a move is made can give your page views a huge boost. This is likely an even better choice than 4, because the ads will be targetted towards the game itself (i.e. chess, blackjack or an RPG) and thus won't harm your CTR.

Any other tips?

[Macro]

If your site receives more than 20 million page views a month, you may be eligible for premium service

Not an open "everybody welcome" club then?

Any other tips?

Sure, I suggest that - before reading your tips - webmasters get to the "almost there" first.

I've got to increase my page views by about 19.9 million, so what am I doing talking rubbish here? Gotta run. Got things to do. Bye.

[dougb]

Hmmm, I might be sort of prudish when it comes to stuff like this, but I'd avoid any optimizations that are not motivated by the end user's happiness. Page-view-maximizing tricks were common in the late 90's when publishers sold ads on a CPM basis, but everyone's wiser than that now. In the end, I think the quality of your site/audience and the number of qualified clicks you can deliver to advertisers will be what they care about, not raw page view numbers.

[martinibuster]

Page-view-maximizing tricks ...

Worked for Ask Jeeves (in the short term at least).

[jaxomlotus]

Well I don't think of it as empty maximization in that sense. I do think of it as more opportunity for people to see an ad that they like.

Regardless, this isn't about generating clickthroughs on your ads.

It is about reaching Google's milestone of 20,000,000 page views a month, which is a page view issue. If you can do both while still maintaining your ad's integrity and CTR (which should happen with everything, except Rule 4) then there should be no problems.

[Eltiti]

jaxomlotus:

Even 4) might be doable, if you go about it in a cunning way...

Say you have 1000 pages worth of widget jokes, wj000.htm through wj999.htm --make them all spiderable through some sort of site map.

Now, when someone visits your "random widget joke page", they will be *redirected* to one of the actual pages. G knows about this page, since it has been spidered, therefore a matching ad will be displayed.

Of course, on each joke page there's a link to the "random redirector".

Would that work for you?

[Lil_Red]

Getting 20 million pageviews is no guarantee if Google can't verify it.

[seaboy]

I agree with dougb, when you start trying to design for Google ads rather than the visitor you may end up shooting yourself in the foot.
For instance, if I'm looking for the picture that would have been #20 on your page and I now have to click through 3 other pages to get there, well I may give up after the first 2 have loaded, and I doubt I'll be returning too often.
This is one of the reasons sites are so desperate to be in the top 10 on Google/SERP - most people won't click much further than the first page.