14 Site Revisions To Attract And Retain Your Visitors

Visitor loyalty and the size of your audience will determine how much you will monetize from your advertising strategies. If you are looking to monetize your site, you will want visitors both new and repeat, to perform a specific action like visiting an affiliate or buying a product.

One of the key things to pay attention to, is creating a site that a visitor can easily navigate. There are quite a few other tips to to apply to your site to increase usability, and therefore possibly increase visitors and retention.

  1. Simplicity: The less features to be distracted with, the less there is to compete for the readers’ attention.
  2. Change color of visited links: Links that change color allow users to know where they are going and where they have been, helping them avoid navigational disorientation.
  3. Load Time: Load Time for a site is very important. If the site is slow, visitors will likely not return.
  4. Writing Level: Keep the content simple and to the point to include a broad range of audiences, including literacy range.
  5. Break up the Content: Use bullet points, bolding, etc. to highlight key phrases and break up the content. It’s intimidating looking at a wall of content.
  6. Avoid Tiny Fonts: Keep you site open to all age ranges by not using small fonts.
  7. Tagline: A website tagline should explain the purpose of the site.
  8. Number: Instead of spelling out “eight”, use”8″. This is especially helpful for people who speed read or scan web pages. The eyes will stop at these areas.
  9. Interactive Features: Be an active commenter, add online voting (like BuzzDash), forums, feedback forms and such to increase interactiveness.
  10. PDF files: Stay away from using PDF files as they are hard to read as they can break reader flow and attention. Only use if you are creating something that is intended to be printed such as a manual or large document.
  11. About Page/Author Biography: Readers want to know more about the author, and including an about page or biography is the perfect way of doing it.
  12. Revisit the Past: Highlight popular posts and link them to previous articles in newer articles.
  13. Update old Articles: If you have a popular article that is heavily link to, then update the article by creating new links to future/current articles on related topic(s).
  14. Avoid Using Pop-ups: Using pop-up advertising feels intrusive to users.

5 Comments;

  1. Paul Bradish
    7:34 am on August 28th, 2007

    Excellent list Susan!

    I especially agree with #1, #4, #5, and #11 - but they are all important!

  2. shaun
    1:21 pm on August 28th, 2007

    all of those points will make any visitor feel more comfortbale on your site. sweet list SU’d it :0

  3. Gregg Hawkins
    3:58 pm on August 28th, 2007

    Awesome tips that I try to follow…except for the one where the links are different colors. It’s kind of ironic that you mentioned something about the literacy range. I visited a blog that I read often and Vijay from siteguide.us posted a link to a website grading service http://www.websitegrader.com/

    It said that my blog’s reading level is at a readability level of an 8th grader. I don’t know if I should improve on that or be happy that most people can understand my writing!

    -Gregg

  4. Brian Purkiss
    4:06 pm on August 28th, 2007

    Very nice points.
    I am currently re-designing my site and will keep those in mind.
    Thank you very much!!!

  5. CASH for COMMENTS
    10:42 pm on August 28th, 2007

    good tips.

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