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Effective Ways to Keep Your Visitors Stay on Your Site
I know that you will not leave this website without reading this simple article. This is what webmasters need. Visitors that leave your site without reading anything is just a waste of bandwidth and all of us, webmasters, don’t need them. But, could we blame them? Of course not – and instead, we should find effective ways on how to make them stay.
As you may notice, the content of this blog is more on the product of my research, especially The Lists. Thus, I spent many hours of searching the web finding for a good strategy on how to keep our visitors stay on our sites but I could not find a good one, until I noticed that my visitors are staying for a couple of minutes reading my posts.
Before we go into conclusion, let me show you the proof. The image on the left shows that a visitor (from Medford, New Jersey), arrived through Google.com, and landed on the Lists of Free Advertising Forums. The image shows how many times he/she left this website by clicking external links but still he/she keeps on coming back.
Do I start to make sense? The image only shows 7 times because the Feedjet tracker has a limit but when I checked my Awstat, the visitor actually clicked all the links on that said page and also added this blog in RSS reader. The conclusion here is very simple; this visitor simply found what he/she was looking in Google.com search page.
Number of Unique Visitors against Page Views
Though having an increase number of unique visitors in your site daily is a good sign of progress but there are some cases where I prefer to have older and regular visitors who stay in my site than, new visitors who just waste my bandwidth and leave without reading anything. These one-stop visitors always brought to your site through unsolicited emails, PPC advertising, or some click exchanges. Looking at the image below, the data shows the hourly traffic and you can see that the number of page views is too high compared to unique visitors. Most, if not, every visitor stays longer in this site. I would complain if I see 100 visitors per hour with 100 page views (totally not acceptable.).
Okay, too much of proof, let’s go to the main topic. How to keep your visitors prolong their stay on your website? I will further explain this based on the data above.
The Power of Hyperlink.
Depending on what type of content your site has, this is applicable to all contents with internal or external hyperlinks. Don’t tell your visitor to click on link and leave your website. What do I mean? It is very simple. When your visitor clicks a link in your page, of course he will be directed to that link and eventually leaves your website. In order to keep him stay while viewing other websites, always code your hyperlinks as “open link to new window” rather than “open link on the same page”. You may them keep him having your original page while he is browsing the new link that he just opened, and he can get back to your page anytime he want. But if you do the coding “open link in the same page”, he will definitely lost your page after clicking the link and he needs to hit the BACK button in order to view your page again, and most of our visitors don’t want to hit BACK button of our browser most of the times. If I like the page and need to stay while clicking outside links, I always right click and select "open link in new window, or new tab", but most of us are lazy to do this, so as the majority of our visitors. Give your visitors the ease to navigate and browse your site.
Content is Still the King.
Looking at the data above again, the visitor is brought by Google search. Because he found what he is looking, he doesn’t care how long he will stay on the page as long as he got what he wants. Make your pages informative and useful to your target audience.
Track Your Visitors
This new and simple feedjet tracker is very useful and I love using it. By tracking your visitors and knowing what they are doing on your site, you may then know what improvements your site needs. For example, most of your visitors stay longer in a specific article - improve this article and update useful information if necessary, and make major improvements to those pages that are least visited.
Regular Update is Necessary
This is very important for us, Bloggers. Our subscribers in RSS or in email always wanted to have fresh information from our sites. Do not make 10 posts today and another 10 posts after next month. If you want your visitors to visit your site again, be responsible for their needs. Every time I got a new subscriber in Feedburner, I’m always motivated to work on my site.So far, this is the only idea that I can share to you right now but don’t worry; more ideas will be discovered along the way so keep in touch. Hope this is useful to everyone, especially the first one, which I have proven to be very effective.Happy Blogging!
Source: http://www.myseoblog.net
