In the amount of time that I have been working in online marketing and SEO, I have seen many, many websites that are graphically rich, informationally poor, and quite frankly terrifying. (And yes, I know that “informationally” is not a real word. I just made it up.) Today I am going to discuss a key component of online marketing – site design. Before I begin, I would like to thank my inspiration for today’s post, Vincent Flanders.
So site design. Why am I discussing site design on a blog that is about making money online, you may ask. I’ll tell you why. Because once visitors land on your site, you want them to actually count as visitors and not instantly run screaming from nightmarish graphics and general overstimulation. That’s what is known as increasing the bounce rate of your site, and you don’t want to do that. Because you won’t make money that way. Traffic that bounces doesn’t qualify as traffic in your analytics, and traffic is the moneymaker..
Below are some tips to decrease your bounce rate from a site design perspective:
· Clean layout
o Your content should be the central part of your page. If you make it all about the advertisements, then it’s obvious to everyone that your site isn’t intrinsically valuable.
· Top bar vs. side bar navigation (or link architecture)
o This is clearly a matter of preference. I find sites with sitewide top-bar navigation to be a lot more friendly on the eyes and on usability. Either way, you want to establish a definitive link hierarchy so that your users know exactly where they are on your site and how they got there. I’ve seen sites with links just thrown up randomly without rhyme or reason. It doesn’t work.
· Clearly defined goals
o You want your site (especially your homepage) to have clear central goals. Having five different brightly colored links scattered around above the fold won’t give anyone incentive to click on a single one of them. You will want to select one or two central goals maximum per page.
· Decent interlinking
o I would like to issue a warning here: If you have a blog on your services site, unless you make it blatantly clear that clicking on a link within your content will get you to the services side of your site, don’t do it. I don’t know about you, but I’m reading a blog either for the entertainment value or for the information.
o That having been said, you should certainly have links within your content to other pages on your site – where applicable and within reason. I cannot stress that enough.
At the end of the day, having a site that will garner traffic is all about common sense. So use it!
Hey I like the word “informationally”. lol. Seriously you are absolutely correct. You really do need to provide some things that are worth coming back to read. But layout is very important depending on your goals. Everyone enjoys a clean layout. So try not to clutter your page with junk. I suggest drawing out your layout on paper to see how everything will interlink to each other.
A clean layout and ‘short and sweet’, upfront content seems to be the most effective, for my sites at least, way of keeping visitors on the sites for more than 5 seconds. Attention spans seem to be getting shorter and shorter by the… moment.
The clean layout is KEY. You will notice the most respected layouts are ones that either have very little style, or none at all. Look at Wikipedia!
I agree with you. visitors comes to read our contents not ads. fast loading page also important for me.
Interlinking too much makes content unreadable– I usually only link to something a maximum of three times per post unless otherwise necessary.
The Looks and layout of your site is important, but adding value and great content to it is much more important. You can have the coolest and cleanest looking website but without “value” no one will return or refer your site to others.
Wow nice and Very interesting blog…….thanks for the information.
These are really some awesome tips and tricks.Thanks for sharing these informative ideas.
Thanks for all this tips. But on some parts of your website you don’t apply all of these tips.