One of the biggest problems facing newspaper Web sites is the inability to keep readers on their site for more than a story or two.

It’s simply a matter of Web design, and most sites are very poorly put together and print focused. Most papers give you a story with maybe a photo or two and occasionally a link to a related item. If your goal is to get people to read more stories, you need a way for them to stumble upon them.

This is how the print product has always worked. A person reads a story and then thumbs through until he or she finds something else that is interesting. This concept hasn’t been duplicated well on the Web, but it’s especially vital in the world of page views and time spent on a site.

Mark Potts has an excellent post about the subject:

The problem: Most news sites are a collection of vertical cul de sacs. You click on a headline, read the story…and you’re left with virtually nowhere to go when you’re done reading. At that point, you’ve got to hit the Back button and return to the home page or section page or whatever to choose something else to read. More likely, you’re just going to leave for another site. You’re not given a lot of choice to stay.

I have argued for years that Web sites need to at least track and display the most popular stories on Web sites by view, rating and most e-mailed (same with photos, videos, etc). This is an easy way to give people recommendations, and a great way to get people to view additional content.

I often view stories at cnn.com based on what is recommended to me either by CNN or fellow viewers. I also really like the Drudge Report because it’s the ultimate in stumbling upon content, but we can go far beyond that. Potts points out that The Washington Post recently added a box at the bottom of every story that contains a list of stories that is populated by stories that “People who read this also read…”

It’s very amazon.com like and it’s a proactive way to get people to consume more of your content. A lot of traffic to news Web sites comes from search engines, blogs, links from friends, e-mails, etc. If people are coming in for one story, then they need to be presented with a reason to stay. Without relevant ways to keep people interested, they’ll simply leave, and your site will be deprived of valuable ad revenue.

Every site should include with every story a most popular section (by views, rating and e-mailed), plus something like the Post does. Beyond that, your site should link to related content. Now, there are two ways of doing this.

You can either have producers or editors manually link to stories, which works if the stories are meant to be packaged together or if the story is a follow-up (ESPN has done an excellent job with this with their Michael Vick coverage) but that doesn’t really work for most stories. Instead, sites should tag their content, so that if I am reading a story about the the al-Maliki government and its troubles, I’ll be shown a list of other stories that were tagged with “al-Mailiki,” “Iraq” and “troubles.”

Developing automated ways to display related content is much more logical. Every story has related stories, but print people don’t think of related stories like that.

They think in “packages.” They link stories together that run as part of a print package, or were about the same exact event or person. Related stories, however, are often much less concrete than that.

If a homicide happens in D.C., there may not be a directly “related” crime, but other stories about homicides, violence and the overall safety of the city are related. Your site should be intelligent enough to give me several other stories, videos, features, etc that are relevant to that homicide story.

My recommendations are the least that every newspaper should be doing. And that’s in 2007. You need to be building features for the future too.

Potts nails it on the head:

If you want to keep readers around, you’ve got to give them multiple reasons to stay — not lead them into a frustrating dead end.

If they leave, they may never come back. Don’t give them a reason to leave.

Some of you have noticed that there are now del.icio.us links at the top of the right column of this blog.

This links will be of interesting and current topics in online journalism and/or Web development. They will be updated continuously as the day goes along. Many of the topics won’t be discussed in depth on this blog, while others will be.

I realize they’re not that prominent, but they also don’t really need to be. The other option would be to have a once daily posting in the main column with links. The big negative of this is that you’ll only get new content once a day, whereas the current method allows for continuous updates.

Let me know what you think and what you would prefer. I’m always looking for ways to make the experience better for users on this blog.