August 21, 2007

3 Tips to Increase Website Conversion

One important and often overlooked strategy to maximize website conversion is to keep visitors on your site longer. If your bounce rate is too high you are not optimizing your site's conversion potential. You may want to follow these three useful tips so that your visitors stay on your site longer and increase your site's conversion rate:

1. Link your pages to other pages on your site: If your site is focused on one targeted topic (as it should), it won't be hard to find pages that reference topics you have already covered on other pages of your site. You can take advantage of this and link to those other pages. For example, if you're writing a movie review that mentions one of the actors, and you've written a biography of that actor on another page, link the name of the actor to the biography page. The more your visitors navigate your site and the more engaged with your content they are, the better your conversion rate will be. A side benefit of this technique, from the SEO perspective, is that the search engines will also follow those links, adding more of your pages to their index and increasing their relevance. Set aside some quiet time to review your site or blog, page by page, to find opportunities for cross linking, and then implement those links. It will be time well spent.
    
2. Write clearly and concisely, and follow the guidelines to writing for the web. Think about a visitor that has just arrived to your site for the first time after finding one of your pages on a search engine, only to see that your text is all bundled in a long winded paragraph with no punctuation, no white space and no clear separation between sub-topics.  Most likely, that visitor will be overwhelmed and will leave your site immediately. Remember that on the web all other sites (your competitors) are just a click away. On the other hand, if you make your site pleasant to read, by bolding key words, using frequent sub-titles, bullet points and white space, your visitors will be more inclined to read other pages of your site. Again, more page views per visitor equals better conversion.

 
3. Include a table of contents: Many sites, especially blogs, are not very well organized. Tools like archives and labels have made organizing blogs easier, but neither of them necessarily reflect the logic you would like your visitors to follow while perusing your blog. Ramit Sehti, author of one of my favorite personal finance blogs ( http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com  ) has made it a point to include a prominent link at the top of his home page that says: "Here's a quick guide to get started", which points to a well organized and detailed table of contents where you can find links to his previous posts organized by topic or date. Every now and then, at the end of a new post, Ramit will ask: "First time here?" and then link to his table of contents. This works great with visitors who have just arrived to his site from a search engine, since it entices them to look for more content and stay on the site longer.

   However you define conversion: increasing subscription rates, selling more affiliate products, having more visitors click on your ads, receiving requests for more information, etc., you will improve it by implementing these three easy tips.

   
   Mario Sanchez publishes The Internet Digest ( http://www.theinternetdigest.net ), a growing collection of Internet marketing articles, tips and resources, and Resource Box ( http://resourcebox.blogspot.com ), a small business internet marketing blog

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