Creating Useful, Traffic Retaining Web Sites

Eric Lander

In the world surrounding SEO, nothing means more than seeing traffic counts and search engine referrals rise. Of course, there are always ways to improve upon what you have – and that’s the fun of the game.

A web site should always be seen as a work in progress. If you are serious about retaining your web sites’ traffic, than you need to find and develop ways to make users stick around and come back often.

Making the First Impression

After taking a long hard look at the search engine referrals, evaluate the top “landing pages” from your domain. Once you can see where the most users are coming and leaving from, you know where to start your work.

Are the majority of users coming in for a series of specific phrases? If so, and you only offer a few pages of content for that topic – build out more. Sounds simple, but it is not as easy as it seems when you need to provide legitimate and unique content. Do your homework, and make sure what you provide is accurate and useful to the type of visitors you are targeting.

Once you have enough information there for the engines to crawl through and index – you need to focus on the usability aspects and the “stickyness” of your web site.

Easily Understood Design & Navigation

Left hand side menus rule this world, and that is simply because everyone is doing it. It may not be the easiest to use, but if we are all trained as surfers to look to the left for navigation – you best do the same.

Once you’ve got a solid navigational structure down, you need to make the link options become organized by relevance. Use breaking bars, small images, horizontal rules and colors to your advantage here. If I am looking to learn about a product your site describes than I expect to see an obvious link that does not fit right in alongside “About the Company” and “Contact Info”.

If users can come in and get around easily, then it’s time to reward your site creating abilities with some tools that will make first time visitors easily become repeating visitors…

Make Exclusive Information Available

If you can utilize the demographical information and email addresses from your site users to your own advantages (for email newsletters, offline promotions, etc.) than it can become highly useful to offer exclusive information available to those who are willing to log in and create a profile on your site.

There are a number of preformatted scripts out there that can help you to set this type of system up. Some for free, others with fees. Regardless of what you use though to set something like this up – you and your company must be ready to perform for these users. If they create an account, they should be provided exclusive information that is not available to all… It’s as simple as that.

Making Your Users Work to Recruit New Users

Most large and worthwhile web sites incorporate recruiting options, but they simply are not labeled as such. How often have you seen the “Email a Friend” and “Recommend this Site” options plastered all over your favorite sites?

Truth is, they work. And, if you can impress the right person, they will go out and send another dozen people your way. If you can impress them, you’ve successfully applied another site marketing tool.

It goes beyond having these scripts available though. Make them fun and entertaining… Chances are, these tools are used to refer friends, and not professional C-level leaders. Do not make everything so serious and cut and dry that it does not sell the link back to the site… Make it fun, but more importantly… Make it work.

Creating a Community

There is a reason people find your site. They searched for something, you had the information – and now they are in. Chances are they search for this type of information often, so now we can move on to addressing a larger scale of users at once. Creating community tools such as chat rooms, bulletin boards and forums are all great ways not only to attract people – but to keep them coming back more and more.

The trick here is that your sites visitors easily become users. Once they are users, they want to show off what they know and feel within these community tools. The next thing you know, you have 30 members talking about your site’s topic – and you did not even lift a finger. Best of all? That is only today’s topic too… Tomorrow, more discussion – and more visitors.

Communicate Early, Communicate Often, Communicate Consistently

Okay, now the bad part. If you want a site to have and retain more users, you need to work more. Sounds like trouble, sure, but if you are good at what you do and are legit – you are home free.

On a consistent time frame, be sure to remain in touch with your users. Email them with a list of new features, ask them to utilize the forums and chat tools, and then finish them off with a sincere thank you…

Visitors become users, users become customers, online business becomes fun.