It is no surprise that the internet has become overcrowded and competitive. You HAVE to be on top of your game to stand out and be successful, so probably the best thing to do is to give your site all the tools and tweaks it needs to achieve your big goals and help growing your business.

Check out these 10 ways to ensure your website visitors are happy, enjoying the stay on your site and always return back, Why you will lose visitors if you can turn them into a loyal readers?

Speed it up

Today’s web visitors have short attention spans. Slow websites lose visitors like Jenny Craig loses weight. Google looks at page speed as well, so speed it up! There are many ways to do this. Simply do a quick Google search to find some tips. I’ll also be writing a post shortly about various ways to increase page speed, so stick around.

Prominent navigation

Web designers are getting really creative these days. This is great because of all the good design that is around, but sometimes designers try too hard to “break the mold” and they end up throwing out a lot of the marketing methodology behind site layout. Creative designs are awesome, hiding important things like page navigation is not. Keep it cool, but keep your marketing hat on too.

Site map

There are several advantages to using well organized sitemaps. It is great for the search engines when spidering your website to ensure they index all of your pages. It is also great for users that are looking for a specific page. They can browse your sitemap and find what they are looking for quickly and easily. I recommend that you organize your sitemap into categories.

Search

Featuring a search bar on your site is a great way to help serve up relevant content to your users. If someone visits your site and is looking for something specific, all they have to do is a quick search and they are served up the content that matches their query. There is an analytics side to featuring a search bar as well. There are ways to track the searches made on your site so you can get a better understanding of what your website visitors are interested in.

Avoid Flash heavy doorway pages

Luckily this trend is coming to a close, but there is still much of this out there. There is no reason to put a page before a page. Web surfers are too impatient to have to visit a doorway page before they get to the page they want, especially if they have to view some extravagant Flash video. Just because you have a cool Flash video doesn’t meant you need to force visitors to watch it. Use the video, just find another place for it. Doorway pages are terrible for your SEO as well, so just try to avoid them altogether.

Categorize your content

This seems like a no-brainer and from what I have seen, most websites do this well. Try to break your pages into categories and sub-categories as much as makes sense. Most web surfers are scanners and the faster you can help them find what they are looking for the better.

Break up your content

If you have a lot of content on your pages, break it up with subheadings and images. This allows visitors to scan your content and digest it fast. Put important information that you want read in bold. Subheadings and images are great to break up long articles. Many visitors will bolt if they come to a page that looks like a book. Few people want to sit on a page for 15 minutes reading web content word for word.

Put thought into your call-to-action

Why do you have a website? Surely you had some goals and objectives in mind when you decided to build a website. I’m guessing that some of those goals were somehow sales related. So, if you’re lucky enough to attract web visitors to your site that are searching for your products or services, make buying easy for them. Highlight your calls to action prominently so the user knows how to take action fast.

Check your links!

The last thing you want is someone browsing around your website and come to a screeching halt when they run into a broken link. It is unprofessional and avoidable. Check your site and have someone else double check it as well. We are all busy and broken links happen, I’m guilty of it and I’m sure you are too. Just try to make a conscious effort to get another pair of eyes on your site to help you find things like this.

Easy on the eyes

By now we can all agree that content is great for your website. With that being said, let your content be great by being easily seen and read. Make your content easy to read. Light gray text on white background may look cool, but could be hard to read. Pay attention to colors on black backgrounds as that can make you text difficult to read as well.

Websites can be powerful tools, but they are surely not set it and forget it. Measuring, tuning and tweaking are ongoing tasks of today’s webmasters. Using these suggestions will help reduce your bounce rate and keep your website visitors happy and coming back.

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