Simple ways to get readers to stay awhile
Getting visitors to come to your blog is one thing. Getting them to stick around is another.
The longer you can keep your visitor’s attention, the more likely they will be to share your content on social media sites, comment on your posts, click on your sponsor’s ads or subscribe to your list. Ultimately, it’s in your best interest to find ways to improve your blog so that these things can happen. Here are 4 very simple ways you can do it.
1. Link to other posts/pages on your blog
This is the number one way to increase the time visitors spend on your site. When you link to other places on your blog from a post, it gives the visitor something more to read, therefore potentially increasing page views (the number of pages a visitor clicks on before leaving your blog).
This can be accomplished many, many ways, but one good technique you can implement is to link keywords in your post to a relevant page or previous post. This will also improve your blog’s search engine ranking for those keywords – but take care to not overdo it.
You can also try using a related posts plugin, such as LinkWithin, to auto-generate and display relevant internal links at the end of your posts.
2. Keep your blog focused
One of the main reasons for high bounce rate is irrelevancy. If people are coming to your blog expecting to read about a certain topic, make sure your posts are relevant to that topic. Otherwise, your visitors will walk away. If you find yourself wanting (or needing) to publish a post that’s a little off-topic, just make that clear in your post. Say something like, “I know this post is a little off-topic, but…” so your visitors will know that it’s an exception. They will probably stick around to find what they were looking for.
3. Use excerpts on your home page
This is not only a good technique for increasing page views and the length of time your visitor stays, it’s also just great blogging technique. When you use excerpts, you give people who land on your home page a nice overview of several articles, and they will mentally bookmark the ones they want to come back to during their visit.
The most important reason to use excerpts is that it will improve visibility into your other content. If for some reason your latest post doesn’t intrigue someone who visits, perhaps your other ones will. They won’t see them, though, if your home page can only fit the latest post. Consider either using a theme that truncates your home page posts automatically, or making good use of the More tag, which will truncate the post at a position that you determine.
4. Improve your navigation
Your visitors won’t be able to read your other content if they can’t find it, so it’s essential that you use good navigation on your blog. Try using an Archives widget or create an Archives page, or display your categories in the sidebar or footer. The last thing you want to create is a black hole, which happens when a visitor comes to a post through a link but then has nowhere else to go but off your site.
All of the above are simple, easy-to-accomplish tips for improving your visitor’s experience with your blog. Essentially, if your site has lots of great content that is easy to find, your visitors will stick around to read it, bookmark it for later, pass it on or decide to subscribe so they can keep up with you. If you have any questions or want more specifics on how to do any of the above, please feel free to reply to this post.
Tips to improve website usability
Usability is an intensive topic in the web development community. As web developers, we must look toward making the user experience better for everyone and apply these tips as what we hope will become standards, one day adopted by most.
In this article, I outline some of the basic ways to improve usability within your website.
1. Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs have always been a way to improve website usability.
It gives readers the option to access content related to the article and shows them which section of the website they are viewing. Normally, breadcrumbs are structured to give hypertext links to the homepage and category of the article.
2. Larger Font
I recently may changes to my website, these changes include a larger font on content pages. I believe it gives the page a better look and helps visitors’ easily read content. You have to think about your audience when you make design changes.
A font-size of 9px will not cut it.
3. Search Functions
Allowing readers to search content is a must. You may not find much use for it in the beginning of your website, but as you build hundreds of web pages it will be a pain for users to find content without archives or search abilities.
4. Load Times
Optimize, Optimize, Optimize…! You must take the time to optimize your images, CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. By optimizing it helps users access content faster and reduces your bandwidth usage monthly.
Smush.it, by Yahoo – Optimizes your images.
Autoptimize – Optimizes your WordPress blog.
5. Browser Compatibility
Always make sure your website is compatibility in all the major browsers, if you do not, then you will lose a large percent of your audience.
6. Be Consistent
Keep design, writing style, and anything else consistent throughout the website. When users first reach a website they tend to scan the page to determine how to achieve the action they desire, by changing elements throughout it can easily confuse them.
7. Include Obvious Contact Information
Your visitors will have numerous reasons for contacting you, which is why it’s important to include obvious contact information on your website. Currently, I include mine on the top of the page within the summary.
8. Be Brief
When writing for the Internet, you should always keep it simple. Studies have shown users only scan content, not reading it thoroughly (word-by-word). Knowing that, you must break content up, make use of hooks to gain attention, and write content in list form when appropriate.
9. Straight Forward Navigation
Keep your navigate structure as simple as possible. Place links in your footer that don’t involve content or required actions from users.
10. Call to Action
If you intent to push products, then you should have some kind of call to action. This has been a technique used by marketers for years.
11. Eliminate doorway and splash pages
Not only are these things a huge design mistake, they’re just plain annoying. If users want to gain access content, show them it, not a splash page.
12. Keep it Simple
I planned for this website to drive home that point, design doesn’t matter, content does. Giving readers consistent pages with rich content is more important than if you created the best looking website in the world.
