Easy Strategies For Refreshing Your Website

posted by ADMIN // August 26, 2009 // What's Next?

Most website owners put a great deal of effort into making their pages search-engine friendly and creating quality content for visitors. Refreshing a website and adding new content is often seen as an SEO exercise, since the search engines assign higher ranking to sites that are regularly updated. However, it shouldn’t end there.

A key part of most successful websites (and all blogs) is generating repeat traffic. That means the site must appeal to visitors, not just search engines! If your site is attracting repeat visitors, you’re doing well. But you need to do more to get them to stay. As people become internet-adept they click through quickly. A site that always looks the same (even if it isn’t) won’t pique visitors’ interest and, unless they are determined to see your site, they can quickly leave.

There are a number of quick and easy strategies you can adopt to cater to your site visitors, capture their attention and show them you’re thinking of their "visitor experience."

-- Avoid a landing page with little more than a logo and/or graphic and the instruction to "click here to enter the site." People are impatient. You want to make an instant impact of the highest order. Most landing pages of this type don’t do this effectively. Direct traffic directly to your homepage and optimise that page to attract their attention.

-- Show your visitors that your site is dynamic and that you lavish attention on it for their benefit. The trick is to find a balance between keeping your site’s distinctive, signature look and making changes that signal that it’s not just the same as it was on their last visit.

Freshening Up Your Homepage

As noted, people surf at an increasingly rapid rate. If their attention isn’t caught very quickly they may move on in a matter of seconds. The visual appearance of your homepage is something visitors will pick up on instantly, without reading the text or analysing their impression. You can capitalize on this with some simple strategies.

-- Update your graphics. A new image says "new content." It can even be the same thing, just a different view.

-- Consider using small color changes to signal innovation. If your homepage has the line "Welcome to XXX" then think of changing the font color, or the background (of the message only – changing the background of whole page is overdoing it). You could change the font as well. Think of the way Google changes its logo on special days, such as St. Patrick’s Day. However, you don’t have to make such substantial changes to make a page look fresh and you should resist over-renovation.

-- Do have a prominent place on your homepage telling people what is new on the site. They may not read a body of text immediately but a simple, eye-catching graphic saying "New!" tells people the site been updated and gives them an instant incentive not to click away.

-- It also helps to communicate when things have been happening on the site. Instead of having a box saying "News," include mention of the month or, if you’re dedicated to really regular updating, "This Week’s News." (You must then make sure it really is this week’s news, if you don’t want to look sloppy.)

-- Alternatively, incorporate a feature of the week, or month, or whatever is most apt. It could be a product, a person in your organisation, a fun fact or a notable development in your subject area. It needn’t be elaborate. A picture and a brief caption are enough to signal that the site is alive.

-- Give your site a touch of humor and erudition with witty quotations, regularly changed. The search engines might ignore them, but your visitors will enjoy them and it will shape their impression of you, the website owner. You’ll find an abundance of choice in any dictionary of quotations.

This would be a great one for a marketing website to start with: "It takes one hen to lay an egg, but seven men to sell it." (C.J. Dennis). Or for an education site: "They teach you anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies." (Orson Welles). For a celebrity gossip site: "There was never an age in which useless knowledge was more important than in ours." (C.E.M. Joad).

-- Don’t rely overly on RSS feeds to alert people to new content on your site. Many people don’t like them and they only reach the converted. You also need to target less dedicated visitors.

Minor -- but well thought-out -- tweaks to your homepage can really make a difference. Implementing all the strategies recounted above is only an hour or two of work, once in a while. Be creative and devise your own ways of wooing your visitors. There’s no point in spending endless hours successfully attracting traffic if your visitors just want to move on.

Author
Solo

Article Source: Constant Content

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